Saturday, November 7, 2009

Cake Decorating 101

I created this blog some time ago, but didn't know where exactly I wanted to go with it. I recently (as in last week) started taking one of those Wilton method cake decorating classes at my local Michael's craft store. It's something I have been wanting to do for quite some time, but the times available had never matched up for me. So, I plunged and I signed up. It was pretty reasonable to start (only about $20 or so) and I thought it was time. The first class was on Monday night. My instructor's name is Zubia. She has a rich accent of some kind, but I'm not certain where she's from exactly. Maybe I will ask her at our next class. Zubia brought to the class a baked box cake, which she skillfully iced before our eyes. I've iced several cakes in my life, and I must say, my cakes never looked that smooth before. This class was a "show-and-tell" sort of class for the first time, with Zubia showing us what she's going to teach us and telling us how we can do the same.

Our homework: to go home this week, and return next Monday night with a cake baked, filled, and iced and another batch of icing ready to decorate. While this seems easy enough, it has proven to be more difficult than I had anticipated. I made a cake today which consisted of two 8" round pans. One pan's cake was perfect, the other pan's cake was maybe halfway baked, runny and messy. I decided I needed to purchase another new pan, and will again today try to bake my perfect cakes so that I can ice them later this evening. I'm hoping they turn out better than Zubia's cake!