Nilla Cakes

Fondant and Gum Paste Flowers

2009-12-01T07:27:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted during this class, so you get everything at once. I have been working on covering a cake in fondant and making flowers out of gum paste. They don't taste very good, but they look pretty. My kids have actually eaten every flower I have brought home and they have no complaints on taste, of course they also eat cubes of butter.

I have had so much fun this class. The flowers are so much fun to make and although I would never eat them off of a cake, it is somehow still awesome that they are edible. I don't guarantee a very professional look because I am still learning, but I would love to make a cake for someone some day. A daisy.

A carnation.

On my final cake, I did daisies with two and three layers and curled the edges more to give them more of a water lily sort of feel. I don't know if you can tell in the picture, but I bought edible glitter called pearl dust and dusted my flowers on the cake with them. The slight sparkle looks really cool against the black and white setting of the rest of the cake. Covering the cake in fondant took two tries, but I think it turned out pretty well. I put a layer of buttercream frosting with raspberry flavoring between my cake layers, too. Not too bad, I think.

Cake Attempts #5 & 6

2009-10-14T19:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-03T10:09:00.001-07:00

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!

Cupcakes

2009-09-30T07:27:00.000-07:00

So, cake attempt #3 actually turned out to be cupcakes. Needless to say, they baked just fine. I have yet to screw up a batch of cupcakes, though I am not saying it won't happen! It felt so plain to just have cupcakes, so I decided to fill them. Yes, that is my favorite raspberry filling. Filling cupcakes was so much easier than I had anticipated, and actually pretty fun!

We focused on piping at class, that is, using the smallest round-holed tips to "draw" on your cake. I had a blast. This was by far my favorite technique because it leaves you so much creativity. You can literally put anything on your cupcake simply by piping. The clown was piped with a star tip. I was looking at him in the book and dreading about how ugly I thought he was, but I actually kind of like him!The skeleton and little Mickeys are my favorite cupcakes. I just thought they turned out cute. Can anyone see lots of scary bones cupcakes in their Halloween future??

Cake Attempt #2

2009-09-22T12:07:00.001-07:00

So this is cake attempt #2 from last week. It has been really busy around here so I am just getting around to posting. Ok, this time I did have shortening so I greased and floured the pans. However, I also used these new Bake Even strips that is supposed to help your cake rise more and come out with a more even top, instead of peaking like they usually do. Apparently I got them a little too wet and my cake had generally the same outcome, a little better perhaps, than the last time. I also decided to try a new filling. This is a chocolate buttercream filling. You start by making a white sauce, but instead of milk I used half-n-half. Then you add like 5 egg yolks and continue to cook. Then you bring it off the heat and add chocolate chips and vanilla. Divine! (as Charise would say!) The only problem turned out to be that didn't quite make it thick enough. By the time I got to class, filling was bulging out the sides of my cake threatening to overflow at any moment, despite my dam of icing around it. But I looked around the room and everyone else who had done filling seemed to have the same problem, so I didn't feel as bad.
I used one of the techniques we learned that night to cover up the sides so you couldn't tell it was about to explode in the center. I got a single complaint later that it had too much frosting around the sides. All I can say to that is...It's free cake! Take you complaint and shove it!...Sam!
Anyway, we mostly worked on writing and star-tips. I thought my star-tips had always been quite good, but I have to say I saw a vast improvement with them from the beginning of the class to the end. I decided on a Halloween cake because my mom might make one with me for her ward and I thought I'd better practice.
What do you think? I think I could maybe to a dark chocolate frosting, it turns out almost black. Then I could do grass on the bottom and maybe some stars or a moon. Hmm...

Cake Attempt #1

2009-09-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

Ok, a few things went very wrong with this cake. And they are all due to one thing: not having shortening on hand. I was very upset to find I did not have shortening because I just did a grocery run last night. I am a big fan of greasing and flouring a cake pan, but had to settle for Pam. Yeah, not the greatest result.

My immediate reaction was anger, mostly at myself for not checking my staples before starting to make a cake. After a few choice words said under my breath so nearby tiny ears did not hear, I decided to take a deep breath and resolve that it was ok. I was not, after all, making this cake for anyone but me. It was my very first cake to practice with and practice is the only way I am going to get better. I concluded that it was ok to start from the bottom because hopefully the only way I could go was up.

I got this new cake leveler and it is AWESOME. You can adjust the height by 2 inches and the little rubber feet slide on your counter while you "saw" your cake right in half. I hope in the future to use it mostly to create tiers in my cake and to add filling in between layers, but this time I actually had 2 cakes where one side was twice as tall as the other. So I actually used it for leveling. It worked like magic.The cakes were so thin to begin with, I only leveled one side, so the end product did turn out a little lopsided and not the smoothest cake I've ever seen. But not too bad for my first attempt.

It was time to try something brand new for me. Filling. For some reason, I had never thought to put a filling in my cake, even though that is my favorite part of store-bought cakes. I went to Wilton.com and pulled up a raspberry filling recipe. This I actually had all of the ingredients for, so that was a good sign to begin with. It was super easy to make and delicious, divine, tasty, yummy, mouth watering good, etc. Given, raspberries are one of my favorite foods, but trust me, it was good.

So I places a small amount of icing on my foil-covered cake board and placed my first cake on top, the icing helped hold it in place. Then I placed my cake board and cake onto my new best friend, the raised turntable. Super handy. I made a sort of outline or moat of frosting to hold the raspberry filling inside and then spread my filling in the middle. I proceeded to place the second cake on top and ice the entire cake together. I then practiced a few flowers on wax paper and then did more than a few on the top of the cake. Not great, but not too bad, either. I was too lazy to tint my icing any color or it might have looked better. Next time. The end product was both delicious and not too bad to look at. All in all, I am pleased with myself.

My New Blog

2009-09-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

Let me start off by saying that this blog is mostly for myself. I don't honestly expect anyone will follow it. And that is ok. I think this blog will mostly consist of my failures in cake making and decorating, and hopefully a few advances and successes as well. Oh, and I expect a lot of pictures. A lot.
I have not really had a hobby in over 10 years. After high school, I worked full-time and took 18 credits a semester at college. There was little time for anything else. Then I got married and was pregnant within a year. Let me tell you, kids take up too much of your time for you to really have a hobby. Then I got an email from Michaels (the craft store) about 2 weeks ago. It said their cake decorating classes were currently 50% off. I went to the store the next day and signed up.
The class is entitled Wilton Cake Decorating Course 1, or something like that anyway. I had my first class this past Monday and will continue every Tuesday night for the rest of the month, when I will hopefully be able to jump right into Course 2. We had about 12 women in the class and decided we would break into 2 classes, in order to get more one-on-one direction. I opted to switch to Tuesdays. The first class was mostly to go over what we would learn throughout the rest of the month, but I did learn some interesting things.
ONE: when icing a cake, use tons of frosting to begin with, then scrape off the extra. TWO: after your icing has set a couple of minutes, you can lay wax paper over it and run your spatula over it to smooth out your icing THREE: you can also lay a paper towel over it and the icing will have a faint pattern. Very cool. FOUR: if you want a certain shape decorated on your cake, make a light impression in the icing with a cookie cutter. Now I know this last one seems obvious, but I had never thought of it before. Nor had anyone else I have told.
I am to bring a frosted cake to class on Tuesday, where we will be learning star tips. I have done a couple hundred star tips in my day, but I fully expect to learn something new. It is nice having something to do that is just for me and I am super excited about this whole venture.