cake decorating class – week 4

Last night was the final class for Course 1 of the Wilton cake decorating classes.  I feel like I’ve learned so much in the four weeks of classes!  I’m also excited because I signed up to take Course 2 in April – it starts next Tuesday…so a whole ‘nother  month of cakes (exciting for my tummy, not exciting for my 2012 goal to lose weight…oh well).  In case you missed the first three weeks check them out here: week 1, week 2, and week 3; also cake decorating related: an amazing icing tip, low(er) calorie cupcakes, and a Fly Guy cake.

So on to this week…this week we learned how to write on cakes and how to make roses.  Compared to the past classes when we’ve learned tons of new techniques each class, learning only two things didn’t sound like a lot.  However, these were both pretty hard to master so I’m glad we didn’t have to rush.

first we traced on our practice board to learn how to hold the bag and how much pressure to use

then we practice free-handing (no, it’s not my birthday – she told us to write “Happy Birthday” and our name)…it turned out a lot better than I thought it would for my first time!

then we learned how to do roses which look complicated, and admittedly they are harder than some of the other stuff we’ve learned, but they weren’t as hard as I thought they would be – this was a particularly pretty one I made while practicing

After we learned those two new things, we spent the rest of class decorating our cake (we had to bring a cake already filled and iced to class) using some of the techniques we’ve learned

I couldn’t really think of any big events coming up to write about on the cake so I just chose “Hooray for Spring”.

The number one lesson I learned this week…spell check before you start writing on your cake…

I’ve told you before I’m not a good speller.  Apparently I forgot that hooray was spelled hooray and instead spelled it horray.  Fail.  We’ll just call that a learning experience…

You need pretty stiff icing to make pretty roses like my white one in the picture above; unfortunately my purple icing ended up being more of a medium consistency so they were harder to make and didn’t turn out quite as pretty.  And that one on the far left got squished when my bag fell over on it.  Bummer.  I liked my leaves, though!

I piped a shell border and put some dots on the sides.  The shell has been the hardest thing for me to get right but I got better with practice.  You can sort of see in this picture that i had started on the right (they are pretty big and uneven) and went around the cake so that the ones on the left were done towards the end and they look much better.

I have really, really enjoyed this class.  I highly recommend taking the Wilton Cake Decorating Course 1 (it’s usually offered at Michael’s, Hobby Lobby, and JoAnn’s).  Just learning the basic cake decorating skills that we’ve learned during these four weeks had made such difference in my cake decorating and I know will be so helpful in the years to come.  I’m looking forward to course 2!