Wilton Decorating Basics - Week 4

On Monday I went to the final class of the Decorating Basics course.  This week was light on learning and heavy on decorating which was fun. The supply list for this week included a cake, frosted and ready to decorate as well as icing dyed to whatever colors we wanted for both practicing and decorating our final cakes.

 First, we learned about writing on cake and got a chance to practice our technique on our practice sheets. Well, tracing some cursive is no big deal, but having to do it freehand on a cake? Yeah, I was terrified! I am horrible at using cursive in everyday life, probably because I never use it. And I never use it because it looks horrible. Catch 22. I digress...  More on cake writing later.

So after practicing our writing, we learned the ribbon rose. Now, I sort of cheated and practiced over the weekend. Several people in class were surprised thinking I’d just gotten it on the first try. Of course I told them I practiced and that it only took 87 sad looking roses, plopped back into the icing bowl immediately upon completion, to get a few good ones. Yeah, that was frustrating.

Finally, the instructor just talked for a couple minutes about the “order of operations” for decorating a cake.

1) Message - so you make sure to have enough room

2) Flowers 

3) Leaves

4) Border

And that was it. We now know all the basics to cake decorating. So then it was time to decorate. I was totally lazy and didn’t design an original cake. I just did one from our class book.

Photo credit: Wilton

I was making this cake for a coworker’s birthday so the first thing I had to do was writing the birthday message on the cake. I was terrified! Here was this perfectly white, smooth cake and I had a piping bag full of purple icing. Maybe I’m crazy but talking myself up to make the first mark on the cake was like... the feeling you get before jumping off a cliff. Okay, that’s dramatic. More like ripping off a band-aid. It was scary! One wrong move and I’d have to start thinking of creative ways of covering up the scribbles on the cake.

But I was very surprised – writing cursive on a cake is actually much easier than with a pen and paper! Who would have thought? It’s probably because you’re going pretty slow. The real difficulty is not smudging the message while decorating the rest of the cake.... no one warned me to look out for that one...

The rest of the cake was pretty smooth sailing. I piped a mound of white icing where I wanted to roses so they would rest on that and not all flat on the cake.  Then I placed my roses, piped some leaves here and there, and did the bottom border and sides of the cake.

This class was a lot of fun. Signing up for this class, and having to get all the supplies, is what led me into the world of decorating and sugar art and to start this blog. I'm having tons of fun with it!

Wilton Decorating Basics - Week 3

Last night was the third week of my Decorating Basics class. This week we decorated cupcakes and started learning some buttercream flowers. For this class we had to bring 6 cupcakes and two batches of frosting pre-colored. While it was a bit of work making, dividing, and coloring all of the frosting, it was really nice not to have to do that in class. More time for learning new things and practicing!

First we did some practice on the practice sheets that come with the class kit. We practiced drop flowers, a shell border, and a couple different kind of leaves. Then we got to make our first pom pom flower. This was the first time we got to use a flower nail.

We also practiced frosting our cupcakes with the 1M tip.

Finally, we learned the shaggy mum flower. This one was harder than it looked.

This class was really fun. It was my first time really decorating cupcakes and I really like it! Cupcakes are easier than cake because you can mess up on one and not have the whole project messed up. :-)

Next week we'll make our final cake and learn the ribbon rose. Can't believe the class is almost over!

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Wilton Decorating Basics - Week 2

Last night was the second week of my cake decorating class. We got to actually decorate our first cake! It was fun but definitely not as easy as I thought it would be.

For this class we had to bring an unfrosted cake, two batches of icing (using the Wilton class recipe) - one medium consistency and one thin consistency, and filling for the cake. And, of course, all of our decorating tools.

First we torted and filled our cakes. I used leftover cake layers and filling from my Mother's Day cake. After that we frosted the cake with the thin icing.

We didn't do a crumb coat first and you can can definitely see a lot of crumbs in my frosting. I think if I'm at home, I'll definitely do a crumb coat from now on.

Then we let our cakes sit for a bit while we practiced using some different tips.

After our cake crusted over, we smoothed out the icing with parchment paper and then did a gel transfer. It's hard to see in this photo, but there's clear piping gel in the shape of a cupcake. You can basically "color in the lines" with your icing after that. Here is the cupcake liner.

Then I added the cupcake frosting

Finally, the cherry on top. And I decided to use some of the extra icing to pipe a dot border around the bottom of the cake.

When I got home, I added sprinkles to the cupcake frosting.

I brought the cake to work today and my coworkers liked it! I was a little worried about it because the frosting by itself doesn't taste too great. I'd read this before from people talking about the class - that it just tastes like pure Crisco, but on a cake, it's actually okay! Good to know. :-)

Next week we learn how to do some flowers on cupcakes - looking forward to it!

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!