Wilton Cake 2 Class

I forgot to take a picture of my final cake before Rick took it to work. Luckily, his friend's cell phone had a camera and he snapped a few pictures for me. Thanks, Tony! The cake was a red velvet cake (old family recipe) with a crusting cream cheese frosting I found on cake central.

In this class we learned how to make flowers using Royal icing and a plaque (bird) using color flow. We had to bake just one cake for this class which took a lot of stress off. Cake1 wore me out because we had to make a cake every week. I had no idea how much frosting it took to frost and decorate a cake! My goodness!

I have to confess, I couldn't get the hang of making mums. I don't know why, but I'll just leave that to someone else to make. All the other flowers were fun to make.

This was my favorite one to make. It's a primrose. I used tip 103, 14 and 1
These are Victorian roses made with tip 97

Here are my pansies. I didn't realize I had left off the two shorter petals on top of the yellow until 3 days after they had dried. Oops. Luckily, no master gardeners were there to eat the cake. :-D
The final cake also consisted of rose buds, violets, daffodils and daisies.

It took me forever to do the basket weave! I used tip 47. I used the smooth side for the vertical piece and the serrated side for the horizontal piece. Another lady in the class used tip 23 for the basket weave. I think I liked it better. The rope border was easier to do than I thought it would be.

Wilton Cake 1 Class

Final project for Wilton Cake 1 class

Week 4: Twelve Pound Final

Yesterday was the last class of four of Wilton Cake 1.

The cake above was used to celebrate Tony's birthday since Tony didn't get to have any of the cake I originally made for him. (see week 3 below)

This is a 10" chocolate cake (Mom's recipe), torted and filled with 3 cups of Beranbaum's chocolate ganache and frosted with 7 cups of Wilton's buttercream. I didn't keep track of how many cups of icing the roses used, so I'm guesstimating 1 cup. That's 11 cups of frosting to complete the entire cake. (yikes!)

The final cake weighed 12 pounds! (technically, 11 lbs 12 oz)

Lesson learned: I used two cake rounds to support the cake but I should have used 3 or 4 because the base flexed a bit as the cake was moved from class to home, then from home to the workplace, causing the crusted buttercream to crack.

I can make roses! Finally!
Wilton's method teaches you how to make the rose in three steps over three weeks. In week two, we learned how to make the center cone (what the pedals attached to), In week 3, we learned how to make the center and three pedals around it, the last week we learned how to do the other two layers of pedals. The only thing that kept me from hating roses, was the fact they were my mom's favorite flower. It took me 60 to 80 tries before I had something that looked close to a rose.

Week 3: Send in the clowns.

This is the second cake I made. My frosting to ice the cake with was too stiff and the frosting to make the clowns wasn't stiff enough. Oh well, it's a learning experience.

And as my instructor, Karen Houdek, says "it's just cake" Does she know how many hours of my life I spent on this? :-D LOL

The clowns started out with great posture but they kicked back and relaxed on the drive home. When I open the box to show them to my husband, Rick, they were lounged back on their elbows looking up at us. I'm just glad they didn't lie down and take a nap! That would have looked too weird...
Lesson learned: Use a stiffer butter cream and let it set up before putting their heads on. Perhaps taking their heads off for the bumpy car ride home would help also. (I don't know if I can do this... clowns are scary enough with their heads on...) :-)

I made the cake by doctoring up a cake mix with sour cream, sugar, flour, vanilla and coffee. It came out really light and fluffy. It was very tasty but I was hoping for a dense cake.

My husband took this cake to work to celebrate his buddy's birthday... the problem was, his buddy (Tony) was on vacation. Rick (husband) took a lot of pictures of his co-workers eating the cake and celebrating Tony's birthday, then emailed the pictures to Tony. Guys are too funny!



Week 2: Our first Cake.

Our class used piping gel and wax paper to trace a rainbow pattern. We flipped the wax paper/gel on top of our cake and lightly pressed over the gel then removed the wax paper. We filled in the pattern using the star tip. I was surprised how much coloring gel you had to use to get a true color. The teens at our church ate this cake.



Week 1:Demo only

We met our teacher tonight. She wheeled a buggy full of items into the class to give us a demo. (little did I know that I'd be balancing a buggy full of my kitchen items with one hand and a cake to decorate in the other for the next 3 weeks. Ahhh. Ignorance is bliss.)

Karen, our teacher, explained how to make buttercream icing and frost a cake. Then she demonstrated both to us (making it look so easy) We were instructed to show up next week with a frosted 8" round cake that was 4 inches high, a cup of firm, medium and thin frosting for practice, plus enough frosting to decorate our cakes. How hard can that be? i-yi-i



Week 0:

Wilton had their classes on sale for half price ($17.50) last month, so I signed up for cake 1.
I had a 50% off coupon that I used on the required kit ($13) and thought all my spending was over. Ha! Not quite. I didn't keep track of how much I spent on powdered sugar, Crisco, and cake mixes every week. (denial is a good thing) ;-)

Wilton Fondant and Gumpaste Final

Wilton Fondant and Tiered cake class Final

Here’s my final from Wilton's Fondant and Tiered Cake class that I took at Michael's Craft store. The cake is a White Velvet Butter cake from The Cake Bible (TCB). It is torted and filled using TCB lemon curd mousseline and covered with TCB fondant.



I stayed up until the wee hours making the royal icing lilies. It took longer to peel the lilies from the foil after they dried then it took to make them.

Fondant make a very pretty cake and although it was tasty, I prefer a cake that is frosted with buttercream.