Cake 202, Class #1

Tonight was our first foray into making flowers. (Okay, not the very first. Ya'll did see my... erm... "roses" from last week.) Wilton Course 2 is all about making the super cool/very pretty royal icing flowers. We used buttercream this week and did a refresher course on the strokes we learned in the last class, as well as branching out and learning how to do rosebuds and mums. And I know, I know, you're thinking... "Rosebuds are in Course 2, when they learned how to the whole rose in Course 1? What's up with that? Wouldn't the whole rose be harder?" And the answer to that question would be "No. No, rosebuds are much harder than the actual rose." Case in point. This is a shot of the lovely practice board. We use this to learn new strokes. As you can see, there are some lovely little pink & yellow rosebuds going on here on the page that I cut out of the manual.

And as this is only a two stroke flower, you'd think it'd be cake. Uhm... No. Here is a sample of my rosebuds. And mind you, this is probably my 5th or 6th practice board full of them. They kicked my trash! Much like parallel parking eluded me back in the day and my instructor ended up advising me to never try it on my own... I just surrendered the icing tip and moved on.

After "learning" (I call it that loosely, as I didn't learn much... just practiced a lot and then gave up) the rosebud, we moved on to the mums. Now, when I think "mums" I think "horrid-white-flower-corsages-that-we-were-peer-pressured-to-get-our-Moms-during-Homecoming-week-when-I-was-in-high-school", but I'm telling you... these little guys were SO fun to make, and they looked freakin awesome when they were finished. I'm gonna go ahead and give you a step-by-step picture show so you can see how they're done. I'm telling you, I'm totally PSYCHED for class next week. This little mum is only a hint of what's to come with the royal icing. I'm giddy at the mere thought of making loads o' flowers. Anyhoo... back to the mum tutorial. Check it. There is a graph/grid of different flower patterns in our manual. The paper that's taped to the nail is a copy of what's in the book, then you use icing or gum (not chewing gum... craft gum, lest you all think I'm a sick pig) to stick a piece of wax paper on top of the pattern. Like so...

Then you use one of the circle tips (I think it was #5) and fill in that middle circle. Easy-peasy.

Then you get the smiley-faced tip (#16? I can't remember for sure, and am too lazy to get up and walk the 20 feet to the kitchen to look) and you do these little petals out through the parameter of the first circle, pulling up on the end to give them kind of a bushy look.

Then you go up to the next level, into the center, and offset petals in the cracks of the first row of petals. Sweet! It's starting to look like a flower!

And then if it looks like you have room, do another row... or just fill it in with 2-3 petals and call it good.

How awesome is that? And SO EASY! ... I got addicted. I made them until... well, until I thought that my veins were gonna pop right out of my wrist. (They're easy, and they're fun, but I'm using muscles... and pumping blood through veins/arteries... that have long lain dormant. I'm telling you, my wrist was KILLING me tonight. Enter the cake class teacher's single doctor son to fix my carpal tunnel right up... I wish.) Anyway, here's a pic of my mums all gathered together. SUPER CUTE!

As for decorating the actual cake... this week was a toughie. We practiced rosebuds and the mum, and then had about 30 minutes to actually decorate our cakes. Of course, I am not gonna disappoint... I will post EVERYONE'S cakes. As you'll see, we all kind of went rogue this week. Totally different designs on each cake. I so love all the individuality we've got going in our cake class!

This is mine. There are my mums, mixed in with the drop flowers that I LOVED from last month's class. I had a bit of an issue with colors bleeding and cake crumbs on the top of my cake... so I went ahead and got all gaudy with the green. I figured that more color would camouflage my boo-boos. Plus, I'm a BIG FAN of color, so I'm always gonna err on the side of "too much going on up there".

This is Christian's. Aren't her red rosebuds BEAUTIFUL? Seriously, she did such an awesome job. You'd think that by sitting by her, some of her rosebudding abilities might come my way... but no, it turns out that cake decorating skills aren't contagious. SHOOT!

This is Tiff & Raina's (the mom & daughter team). This week they decided to only bring one cake, and ice it together. They always do such a good job. Aren't Tiffany's borders so cool? (As a side note, my cousin Becca is also taking these courses and she sent me pics of her Course 1 finale cake. She did the same super cool dots-in-the-shells border. Seriously, I'm surrounded by genius. It just never hits me!) LOVE-LOVE-LOVE the borders!

And... Christine's. Isn't this pretty? I love the bouquet. LOVE IT! And dang her, if she didn't get another perfect bow! (I left bows behind last class... right about the same place I left off with rosebuds this week. I'm so screwed when it comes to that tip. It KILLS me!)

Anyhoo... that's the scoop on cake class this week. We won't be doing another actual cake until the last class of this course. We're working on flowers only next week and the week after. I'm pretty stoked... I have my fingers (and toes, and arms, legs & eyes) crossed that it's not gonna get any harder than the rosebud already was. I am seriously doubting that it's gonna get easier (and/or that all of that crossing myself will work) but heck... Wish me luck!