Baking Demonstrations Delve Into New Cocoa Alternative And Hyper-Realistic Cake-Building Techniques

At Bakery Showcase on May 3, Reid McEachran led an informative session on a new, single-ingredient cocoa alternative product and how substituting a percentage of the alternative product for traditional cocoa can reduce your bakery’s ingredient costs by up to 35 percent.

McEachran said cocoa has seen a lot of instability and it’s been subject to quite a lot of price fluctuation from peaks highs. Sixty per cent of the world’s cocoa powder production comes from the Ivory Coast and Ghana. Production in Canada does not meet the demand.

In response to global supply chain volatility and rising prices in the cocoa market, Ardent Mills has introduced a sustainable wheat-based cocoa substitute designed to provide long-term price stability. The alternative ingredient, Cocoa Replace, is made using roasted and malted wheat. McEachran described it as a clean-label, non-GMO alternative that mimics the colour and flavour of traditional cocoa while improving moisture retention and product texture.

During an interactive blind tasting poll, in which audience members generally could not differentiate between traditional cocoa and the alternative product, which can replace up to 35 per cent of natural cocoa and 90 per cent of dark cocoa without sacrificing consumer likeability or requiring significant changes to existing formulations.

In a fun, informal session on May 4, April Julian, celebrated cake artist and contestant on the TV show “Is It Cake?” went through three key areas related to building a hyper-realistic cake and achieving tiny details that fool the eye into thinking that an object that, for example, looks like a shoe is actually a cake.

Julian showed photos of some of her favourite projects, including her Big Mac cake in which she pressed tin foil around the edges of the cake to create little creases around the edge of the bun.

“I spend a lot of time thinking about how am I going to build that from the inside out so that there’s structural integrity and so that you can achieve the the sort of weird shapes that you need to to trick the eye,” Julian said during the demo.

“It’s funny, when people think about cakes and cake decorating, they think of, going to the grocery store, getting all your materials, going to the cake shop, getting your fondant. [In contrast,] I spend maybe 75 per cent of my time at the hardware shop.”

She recommended using fondant versus sugar paste for covering cakes and said she prefers to use mild chocolate “because it acts like clay blended into itself in the same way that clay would.”