Cake Decorating Class

I decided to take a cake decorating class. I had reached a point where I couldn't just learn it from reading it in a book. I really needed to be able to see it done, as well as be able to ask questions. So I ran down to Michael's and signed up for their Wilton Basic Cake Decorating Course. It was super fun. So much so that I'm going to take the level 2 class, Flowers and Cake Design. Here are some pictures and descriptions of what we did. 


First you learn how to ice a cake. There is this amazing piping tip that makes this step soooooooo much easier. After that, we transferred a pattern onto the cake and filled it with icing. This is not a technique that I ever see myself using voluntarily, but if someone else wanted something specific I can now do it. I made this cake for Joe because the first class was on Valentine's Day. Even though we don't celebrate V-Day, I wanted to make my first cake just for him. So it is a chocolate cake with Nutella filling and vanilla buttercream frosting. It was delicious. 

Next we learned to fill and decorate cupcakes. I made vanilla cupcakes and filled them with black cherry preserves iced with a vanilla almond frosting. We learned to pipe drop flowers, shaggy mums, starburst flowers, and larger floppy flowers. 

Along the way we practiced other decorating techniques and for the last class we had to design and decorate a cake all on our own. I wanted to use up my colored frosting from the previous class so that dictated some of my design. I made this cake for my parents as a thank you for watching Lily while I went to play with cake. This is a vanilla cake with a blueberry buttercream filling and vanilla almond frosting. The edges aren't very neat because I ran out of yellow frosting, and it's kind of hard to see but there are tiny white dots in groups of three that are called Swiss Dots, but the flowers turned out pretty nice, I think. 

Now for this class you have to make the icing with vegetable shortening or it just does not hold up to being handled for 2 hours. I much prefer the Italian Meringue Buttercream that I've made for previous cakes, but it takes a bit more effort. So as I make cakes for people and not for class, I will preferentially use the higher quality buttercream. But for practice, the shortening version is easier. Also, Wilton is a huge fan of artificial coloring. For the purposes of class, no problem. Would I ever personally choose to dye frosting unnatural colors? Probably not. At home I've been experimenting with natural food dyes (see Cake Success!) and will be going that route for cakes I make for people as well. 

So this was super fun and I'm excited to start the next class in March. It's also been really nice to have something that's just mine. I love being at home with Lily, but it feels good to get out of the house and interact on an adult level with people who don't just want to talk about kids. Also, I like having a legitimate reason to make (and eat!) cake.