Wilton Decorating Basics - Week 1

I have been anxiously awaiting my cake decorating course for over a month. My friend, A, and I signed up for the class together at a local JoAnn Fabrics store. We wanted to take the April course but it was full. So... it was a long wait, but last night we had our first class.

Most of the class was lecture. Our instructor demonstrated how to make Wilton buttercream (we will have to make a lot of this throughout the course of the class), how to level a cake, how to torte a cake, and the proper way to frost a cake. She also showed us how to do a gel transfer, which we will be doing next week, as well as several other things.

During the last 20 minutes we were able to practice fitting a bag with a coupler and tip, filling a bag with frosting, and piping stars. We were instructed to bring a pre-made can of Wilton icing as well as our own cookies to practice on.

While piping stars isn't that exciting, it was fun to try to pipe icing that is cake-consistency rather than the cookie consistency that I'm used to.

We didn't use all of our icing jar in class so when I got home from work today I decided to try out some different things. The pre-made icing comes as "stiff" consistency but in class we added water to make it "medium." My experiments really should have been done with stiff icing in order to hold their shape better, but it was still fun.

Don't k now if this is right, made it up as I went along...

Just imagine a cake covered in this... so pretty!

I think I'm going to like cake decorating...

Next week we will decorate our first cake - can't wait!