cake class

I have fallen quite behind on July pictures. It's bad when my husband says "you haven't blogged in awhile" I'm impressed he noticed.

So I picked something I could post about quickly.
My cake class.

I was inspired by Julie and her cake making skills and decided to get some friends together and take the class too. I've been trying to make the kids' birthday cakes each year and plan to continue, but I knew there was a lot I didn't know.

We're taking the class at Michael's in Wichita. It's just once a week for 4 weeks. There's some prep involoved and we have to make A LOT of icing to practice with. My icing didn't taste good AT ALL. Pretty much tasted like shortening. I should have just used the recipe I got from Julie, which we used for my niece's Barbie cake (it was DELISH!) But I followed directions and used the recipe from the Wilton book. Next week, I think we are ALL trying this other recipe - half butter, half shortening, and not just shortening.

Buttercream Icing

1/2 cup Crisco (white)

1/2 cup salted butter

2 T. milk1 tsp. vanilla

1/2 tsp. butter flavoring

1 drop almond extract

1 lb. powdered sugar

1 T. meringue powder

Cream shortening and butter until smooth. Add flavorings, milk and meringue powder. Add powdered sugar and mix until creamy. (In class we learned to use water instead of milk and then your frosting can be stored in air tight containers and not have to be refrigerated, which make it nice for class)

I torted a cake for the first time. I didn't even know what that meant. I was proud of myself when I did it though. Yeah, I'm amused by the little things sometimes.

We had to go to class with our cake frosted and be prepared with a picture that we were going to put on the top. Since I was out of town, and had no time to be creative, I just did the class example - a rainbow.

I forgot to take pictures of the progress, so you just get the final product.


It happened to be my niece's 5th birthday. So I decided to write her name on it so the cake would have more of a purpose than just sitting on our counter and then go in the trash.

Don't look too close. After pulling out all the icing I needed for practicing in class, I barely had enough to frost the cake, so it was SOOO thin. You can see cake peaking through in some places. AND, because it was so thin, I worked forever trying to get the cake all covered, and ended up pulling up lots of crumbs in the process. Obviously, I could have made more icing. But since it was just for class purposes, I didn't feel the need.

In class we learned how to do things with teh star tip and the writing tip and we learned to make the Wilton rose, just like the ones in this picture...

(I DID NOT make this cake, stole it from the web)

I wasn't so good at the rose. But we'll practice it again next week, so we'll see if I'm any better.

Next week we're going to learn how to pipe figures.

I've really enjoyed this class. I feel like I've learned a lot of the basics and things I wish I had known sooner when I did the kids' cakes. If you have a chance to take the class....you should!!!

And here's a fun idea.....make this rainbow design on the outside and do THIS on the inside! Dave said it would be too much rainbow....I beg to differ!!! You can NEVER have too much RAINBOW!!!