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Saturday, October 30, 2010

Cake Decorating

As many of you know, I've been getting into cake decorating for awhile now, pretty much just for the fun of it.  I remember growing up, my mom used to always make and decorate our birthday cakes.  She was pretty darn good at it too.  Ultimately I'd like to be able to make my daughters birthday cakes (and first day of school cakes).

So my first class was over the summer.  It was a beginner class so I learned the basics of baking and icing a cake with buttercream frosting.  Yes, I was pretty clueless about how to bake a cake and get it out of the pan properly - feel free to laugh at me now.  I'll get the last laugh.

I learned a lot of basic decorating ideas as well.  I learned how to make clowns out of frosting.  I learned how to make pretty roses.  I also learned a few different styles of cake borders.  After that class, I made cakes for every function I could get away with.  Thanks to my family for being willing to eat so many cakes made from a box, decorated by yours truly.  Here are pictures of some of my work.


 I recently decided to expand my horizons.  So I signed up for Wilton's Flower and Cake Design Class.  It's held at my local Michael's by a great instructor who's been doing this for years.  The first class was spent playing with fondant and gum paste.  You can make easy cut-out flowers that dry hard.  We made button flowers as well as pansies.  Here's my handiwork.
 

The next class was my first experience with royal icing.  Now, I love royal icing.  It's made with powdered sugar, meringue powder and water.  So easy and clean up is a breeze (as opposed to buttercream frosting, which is made with shortening and a pain in the rear to clean up). And the frosting dries hard so you can make a bunch of flowers, let them dry and then save them for a future cake.  At this class we learned to make the base of a rose, apple blossoms, primroses,  and rosebuds.  I had my challenges but I think my flowers turned out pretty good.   




My third class consisted of more royal icing frosting.  We finished up learning how to make roses, and we learned violets, daffodils and lilies.  I think the lilies are one of my favorite - easy to make and so pretty to look at.  




I just had my final session of the class this past week.  This time I had to bring a frosted cake to class.  We learned how to do basketweaving on the side of the cakes.  Very pretty but really, really time consuming.  Then we got to decorate our cakes however we wanted using the flower designs we had learned so far.  I decided to go with....



3 comments:

  1. You are doing a great job! Keep up the good work!

    Isn't it fun having a hobby that involves dessert? ;)

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  2. how did you get the shape of the red, white, and blue star cake? would you mind sharing?

    ReplyDelete