Cake Attempts #5 & 6

So, obviously it's been a little while. Not having to make a cake for class has taken all my motivation out of cake decorating. It is just really hard to take the time to make everything, not to mention cleaning up afterwards, when there is no real purpose to it. However, today was a challenging day and I needed some stress relief.
I wanted to practice my roses, so the first cake I made was a floral one. Oh, and the red frosting? I wasn't thinking about the floral cake when I tinted the frosting, only the Halloween one. So forgive the clashing color scheme. Overall, my roses turned out awesome and my leaves were simple and neat. All in all, a cake well done. Given a different base frosting color, I would not hesitate to give this to a neighbor or friend. Proud.
Now, the Halloween cake I mentioned. I absolutely love this cake. One of my favorites. You may remember the skeleton, aka scary bones, I did on the cupcake a while back. This time I wanted him to have eyes and a smile. I ran out of white frosting, so I just left those negative spaces and I love the effect. I drew some freestyle bats in the background and wrote some Halloween sayings around the edge. It has been pointed out to me that I have spelled "cackle" wrong, but on a cake that is solely for myself I am ok with that. Don't worry, if you ask me to do a cake for you I would surely spellcheck beforehand. Oh, my favorite part. I forget the name of the technique, it is supposed to look kind of lacy. That was tons of fun to do, but my favorite part is the bones that line the bottom of the cake. Just plain cute. What do you think??

Cake Attempt #4

I have decided not to post Elle's birthday cake on this blog. I know it was a cake attempt, but I already posted it on my main blog. So if you want to see it, you can look there.
Well, I had my last cake decorating class on Tuesday. We learned the hardest thing, in my opinion, in cake decorating...the Wilton rose. How did it go, you ask?
It started out like any other cake-making experience. I decided to do a box mix as I was having a rough day and didn't feel like I had time to make a cake from scratch. I was close to the point of tears with my kids, so I was excited to be doing something I find fun and relaxing. My cakes cake out of the pans clean, so I was off to a good start. I put a layer of cream cheese frosting on top of my first layer and then arranged strawberry slices on top of that. Some more frosting kept them in place and also stuck the second layer on. Then came the time to frost the whole cake. Disaster. You know how even though you can make something, like frosting, all the time and every once in a while, despite not doing anything different, it just doesn't work out? Well, let me just say that I don't think I have ever seen an uglier cake. It was awful. By the time I got to class, the cake had been shaken slightly by the ride in the car, and my middle layer was pushing through and my icing job looked even worse. The only bright side? I absolutely love fresh fruit in a cake and regardless of how it looked, it still tasted delicious.
So, the roses. My icing was a little too stiff, so the edges of my flowers were not coming out smoothly. They looked more like carnations to me than roses, but still really pretty. I thinned out my icing, but still never got those straight edges. I would like to try again with a different icing recipe. I also learned that one of the leaf tips is excellent for leaves, the other is not, but still makes really pretty ruffles. I decided to add this ruffle effect on the bottom border to try and distract from the ugliness of the icing job. All in all, it was a super fun experience and I can't wait to start my second class in November!