On September 9th 2017, we got the opportunity to be one of the lucky people who joined Almond Tree Kitchen Hopping experience in 2 outlets in Jakarta. In case you are not familiar with Almond Tree Cakes, this is actually the new brand of the famous local shop we all grow up with, Cheese Cake Factory Indonesia! Personally, we are big fans of their products, especially the cheesecakes line, we always celebrate our family events like birthdays, anniversaries and so on, with their cakes, usually the Mixed Fruit or Strawberry Cheesecakes.
The Almond Tree Kitchen Hopping though, is actually a new kind of event, where only 10 guests are gathered each session in an Almond Tree Cakes outlet to join a baking class and they will then move to another Almond Tree outlet for another class by riding a provided bus. It was a super fun and engaging experience, and I can’t wait to share what we experienced that day!
As the gathering is only limited for 10 person in every class, we got the chance to join the 2nd class on September 9th. There were 6 foodies including me, and the other 4 participants were the lucky persons who won the invitations to the class by registering through the website. We started quite early around 10AM at Almond Tree Cakes Tomang, with a long table set up beautifully with each of our names on it, complete with the prepared necessary ingredients and equipment for the baking class.
One of the perks of joining these exclusive classes is that you’ll get to meet different celebrity guests and you won’t know who you are gonna meet there until the day before the event! We were told that the first class had Reza Rahadian, a popular Indonesian actor, as the guest star, and we were ecstatic to find out that our class’ guest star is Nirina Zubir! Although I can’t state that I am her fan, but I have always loved seeing her on medias, thanks to her outgoing and attractive personality. Nothing is more fun to join a baking class with fun guest star leading you in front, no? XD
Celebrity Hosts: the funny Augie Fantinus & pretty Nirina Zubir.
For a warm-up, we made Chocolate Berliner, of course not from scratch, but we were given the pre-made dough so we only needed to roll out the dough into certain thickness, make 3 (or more) round cuts out of it, and waited while our dough were being deep-fried in the kitchen. While we were waiting though, Augie & Nirina had some interesting topics to talk about and the Almond Tree Cakes also shared some gifts by throwing few funny quizzes to us.
Finally, my berliner was ready! And all we had to do is just to make a hole in one side of it to fill the chocolate inside. I think I overdid this part because my berliner looked like it almost exploded because of too much filling, LOL! After that, just dip in one side of the berliner to the chocolate ganache so we can decorate it with the colorful toppings.
Voila, my Chocolate Berliner is ready! <3 It looked so fine, fluffy, attractive, and inviting at the same time. And yes, it tasted so good, too! 😉
We didn’t stay longer after finishing our Berliner, we moved to Almond Tree Cakes Cikini together by a provided bus. Luckily, it was Saturday noon and Jakarta’s traffic wasn’t bad (yet) that time, so it took only less than 30 minutes to reach Cikini outlet. When we arrived, we had lunch first before starting the baking class with theme of Red Velvet Party!
There were 2 kinds of Red Velvet we made that day: Ice Blended Red Velvet & Red Velvet Cake. The Ice Blended Red Velvet is a drink so we had to take turn using the blender, but since there were 3 blenders on the table, I only shared it with another participant. They already prepared everything so all we had to do is just pouring everything into the blender and decorate it later. Red Velvet is not really my favorite flavor but I have to say I love this recipe because it was creamy enough but didn’t make me feel sick. Plus, because I made it myself, I got to decide how much cream I wanted to put on top of my red velvet drink.
For the Red Velvet Cake, each of us already got cut-into-three layers Red Velvet cake so all we had to do is just to put the layers one by one, cover them with jam and cream cheese, top it with another cake layer, and so on. The cream cheese squeezing part was actually quite tiring, not to mention that it needed extra patience to cover every inch of the cake perfectly!
After covering the cake with the last layer of cream cheese, we waited for 40 minutes for the cakes to be chilled in the refrigerator. Then it came to the best part: decorating the cake, YAY! The most difficult thing was to spread the red velvet powder to cover all cake body beautifully, because it can get really time-consuming! But I do love baking and decorating stuffs like this, and I enjoyed every seconds of it!
So.. this is my creation of Red Velvet Cake named Winter in Red Velvet Forest! XD Sorry for the cheesy name, but I couldn’t come up with something better because I was too excited to decorate my cake, LOL!
We had a really fun experience with Almond Tree Cakes that day. I didn’t really know what to expect when we were invited for the Kitchen Hopping class but we are glad we joined it! Rather than usual foodies gathering, we got the opportunity to actually participate in making something so delicious by our own hands and although the process is not exactly from the scratch, we got to learn something from these classes! Hopefully there will be more and more events like this in the future and cheers to Almond Tree Cakes for having us, thank you!
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** This review is written based on our visit on 9 September 2017.
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