Cakes

A few months ago, I decided to take a cake decorating class. Wilton cakes offers classes through craft stores like Hobby Lobby and Michael's. Since I was taking the semester off of school, I thought I would use the time to finally do this. I have been talking about it for a long time. I love to bake and really wanted to gain the skill to properly decorate.
So, I embarked on a new hobby. And I love it!

There are four courses in the series. Each course has four classes - one per week. The first course is an Intro course where you learn basic decorating. How to make the proper consistency of frosting...etc. Now, I love frosting, so this class was murder on my diet. Luckily, after 8 weeks, I am getting a little sick of frosting.

The first cake we made was this rainbow cake:

We had to bake and frost the cake at home and decorate it in class. I have to say, the "at home" piece was like an I Love Lucy episode. Thank goodness for my dear friend Cindy, or I would have never made it. I won't go into details, but lets just say we had to scrape off all the frosting and do it over again. Even then, it was far from smooth. Turns out there is a trick to getting your frosting smooth.

This cake was great, because we learned how to do the star technique that you see on a lot of character cakes like Elmo and Dora. It was embarrassingly easy. However, you have to have the proper consistency of icing for it to turn out well. I would have never pulled it off on my own without that piece of information.

The grand finale cake for this course was this one that I made for Easter:

I got the frosting a little smoother this time. I surprised myself that my roses came out so well. Practice makes perfect for those suckers. And my writing is seriously lacking....but again, perhaps with practice I might get better.

After the first course, I was totally hooked. So I took the second course: Flowers and Borders.

For this one, we spent three classes learning to make all kinds of flowers. These take a different frosting than basic buttercream. For these, you use "royal frosting" which is just powdered sugar and water. This stuff hardens like a rock and will never go bad. So you can make the flowers in advance.

Over the weeks, we stocked up on flowers to make the grand finale cake:

I had a blast on this one. I could pipe flowers all day long. On the last day, we learned how to do the basket weave technique. I was really proud of this cake. By this time, I was getting much better at baking and frosting.

I am no artist, but I fell in love with cake decorating. I am really excited to apply my new found skills.
I start back to school this summer, so I won't take the next course for a while, but I can't wait to go back. The next one is Fondant and Gum paste.
Some day I hope to be as good as my cake decorating idol.
I would love to make Mia a birthday cake like this:

Or this:
And frost cookies like this:

photos by The Good Apple

If any of you think you might be interested in taking these classes, I highly recommend them. The classes are very inexpensive, but all the equipment added up to well over 100 dollars. Also, as I mentioned above, if you don't want to gain 5 lbs, I would give your finished cakes away. My husband wasn't happy that I gave my flower cake to our neighbors, but he will thank me later. :)