Baby Shower Cake

My Sister In Law asked me to make a cake for her baby shower last week. I went online to the Wilton website to try to get some ideas. I saw this one and figured it was cute and looked easy enough. While it wasn't HARD, it was still very time consuming. I'm glad I didn't choose something more elaborate because I'm not sure if I would have had time to sleep!

The head of the cake was vanilla with vanilla cream filling and vanilla buttercream icing. The body of the cake was swiss chocolate with mint buttercream filling and icing. It was covered in a ton of fondant and the feet, arms, and ears were made of cake board covered by fondant.

Final Wilton Class cake

Well, I took my last Wilton cake class the week of Thanksgiving. This was a tiered cake. I wanted to do the version where the layers sit right on top of each other but for a couple of reasons I decided to stick to the columns (which are plastic and pretty eh). It would be easier to transport the cake this way, and then my instructor was supposed to bring things that would help us with the cake (hedge clippers, a little hammer, etc) but she didn't bring them. She actually offered to go around the corner to the store to buy some more but I wouldn't let her.

We had a choice of different flowers to make from all the flowers we learned in the class. I started off by making some fondant roses, but they were so time consuming and I had zero desire to spend both days of my weekend making fondant flowers. So I switched to royal icing flowers instead. I was done in a couple of hours. Much better!

Since I worked from home the day after making this cake, this is the only one that I didn't take to work to get devoured. I took it to the Hartgrove's house for Thanksgiving, then to my parent's house, and there was still so much left over. And I even threw away the top tier because it had cream in it and I didn't refridgerate it. So much cake!

Course 3, Class 2

I am now taking the last cake class that is offered at Michaels. I am kind of sad, but will be glad to not have to prepare icing or cake every single week. I think this was my favorite cake of them all so far. And from the comments that I got from people who saw it I think it is a favorite of others as well. It is a cake that is supposed to look like a present. First we covered our cakes in fondant, then created the bow and cut outs to put on the cake. The rest of the class was spent learning how to make the fondant roses. I think our final cake is supposed to have an insane number of fondant roses on them, so I think that this next week I'll be spending my free time making fondant roses.

This next class we don't have to make a cake, we just have to bring a ton of different colors of royal icing. We will be learning how to make a few more flowers like lillies and poinsettas.

Here are more pictures of the cake. This one was a little boring - just a butter cake with vanilla buttercream filling. I was rushing to get it baked and frosted so now fancy filling this time.

Cinderella Cake

One of my coworkers had joked around about me making a cake for him one day. Then he suddenly came to me and said he was serious. It was his daughter's 6th birthday and he needed a cake to feed 25 - 30 people. And that his daughter wanted Cinderella. It took a lot of prep, and I definitely came out in the red after he paid me because I had to buy a bunch of new supplies, but here is the final result. He said that she loved it!

Birthday cake for my in-laws

My mother and father-in-law both went to Louisiana State University for college. They also have birthdays in consecutive months. So since we had one celebration for both this year, I decided I couldn't go wrong by making an LSU cake. So here is the cake along with the inspiration for the cake. Unfortunately I only took a cell phone picture:

Course 2, Classes 1 - 4

In course 2, we only had to make 1 cake and that was in the final class. The other 3 classes we spent playing with royal icing and learning how to make different flowers. Then we saved all the flowers we made for the final cake. After each class I came home and made a ton more flowers with the rest of my icing because the royal icing hardens and you can keep them for a year to use as decoration on other cakes.

After the first class I learned how much my dog Charlie loves royal icing, as while my flowers were drying on the dining room table, I headed out to the grocery store. What I came back to was the dog standing all fours on the table eating the flowers. They dry on squares of wax paper, and counting the leftover wax squares, I counted that he ate 60 of them. Luckily it doesn't appear that he got sick from it. And lesson learned for me to keep them on a surface even higher than the table.

I'm trying to remember all the flowers we learned: chrysanthemum, violet, apple blossom, daisy, victorian rose, daffodil, pansy, and primrose. In the final class we learned the basket weave with buttercream icing along the sides of the cake, and then put our flowers on our cake.

Once again my coworkers devoured the cake. They had been requesting chocolate, so I made a chocolate cake with a chocolate mousse filling.

Fondant and Gumpaste, Class 4

The final Fondant and Gumpaste class! We had the choice to makes one of several cakes in our book. I chose the daisy cake because I thought it was the prettiest, and it didn't involve making a drape. Preparation for this class was pretty extensive. It probably took 6 hours to bake the cake, level it, tort it, fill it, ice it with buttercream, cover my cakeboard in fondant, cover my cake in fondant, and do some gumpaste flower making. Those 6 hours plus the 2 hours spent in class makes 8 hours spent on making this cake! Hopefully I will get faster as time goes on.

We didn't learn too much more in this class other than some more borders, then it was time to put together our cakes. Here is the final product! It is a french vanilla cake with strawberry filling. I even bought fresh strawberries to add to the filling, but when I picked them out of the fridge, I dropped them all over the floor. Oops. So no fresh strawberries.

Fondant and Gumpaste, Class 3

No cake was made for this class! We started working with gumpaste here and spent a good deal of time on making carnations and daisys. The carnations were really fun to make and I wish that I had taken a picture of the finished ones. They were quite a bit of work though. We also made some leaves and something called the "fantasy flower" which isn't a real flower found in nature, but it was pretty. Nothing more to really report for this one - it was just a lot of time cutting out and forming flowers.

Fondant and Gumpaste, Class 2

We had to bring a cake frosted with buttercream to this class. She told us to do a dense cake, so I chose carrot cake. The first thing we did was cover the cake with fondant. This was an interesting process and I got behind at this point in the class and never quite caught up which was frustrating.

We learned how to make a drape for the cake, embellished cut outs, and garland and borders. This cake was weird because she just wanted us to put the different things we learned on it. I also wasn't planning on taking this one to work so I didn't put too much effort into making it look nice. I didn't even take a good picture of it because I only had my cell phone with me at the time because I was house and dog sitting for my parents. So you get a lovely cell phone pic.

Fondant and Gumpaste, Class 1

This is the unofficial 4th Wilton class, but instead of calling it Course 4, they call it "Fondant and Gumpaste". During our first class we learned the basics about fondant and it's uses, and we covered our cake boards in fondant. Fairly boring and I'm not sure I'll ever waste the time and resources to cover a cake board in fondant in real life. We saved our boards to put the cake we had to bring to class the next week on.

Course 1, Class 4

I had to miss class 4 when I was originally supposed to take it due to some sad family events. My instructor told me I was free to come in and take the class when she taught it the next month. That led to a busy cake week having to prepare for two classes and bake 2 cakes within 3 days.

The big thing we learned in this class was roses. I am still not happy with the final result of my roses, but I impressed my coworkers who didn't really know any better.

The cake I made was a cookies and cream cake made with Oreos! Yum!

Course 1, Class 3

In this class we began by learning the center petal of the Wilton rose. I managed to get it in the end, but in the 2 weeks I have before our final class (the instructor is out of town next week) I should probably practice so I can get it right every time. Then we moved onto shell borders, then large dots and hearts. After that we learned the drop flower and the swirl flower. Finally, we learned the clown. I am a little disappointed that there was an entire cake dedicated to this clown because I think there are a lot of other things they could have taught us. Oh well.

I made a bright colored cake this week. I tried to get the green a lime green, and then my decorations are royal blue. Everyone else did white bases with pale colors. My final cake will be a lot less obnoxious. But this was clowns after all. What is more obnoxious than a clown?

I added a shell border to the top and bottom, and also added the flowers that we learned in class. Oh yeah, and my clowns have really long arms.

Course 1, Class 2

Tonight was my second Wilton class. Our homework was to bake an 8 inch round cake, and ice it with light blue icing for class. We also had to make up hard consistency icing to practice making the Wilton rose, medium consistency icing to practice stars and lines, thin consistency icing to practice writing, and then medium consistency icing in red, yellow, green, blue, and purple for our cake. It is amazing how many hours that actually takes. I did, however, get to use my trusty mixer a lot which always makes me happy.

I decided to make a yellow cake and filled it with raspberry preserves. I learned one thing while making the cake. I thought I could skip buying the Wilton baking spray and just grease the pan instead. It definitely did not come out of the pan easily though, so I guess I'll be picking up some of the Wilton spray.

In class we did a lot of learning and practicing how to use different tips to ice shapes. Then we started to ice our rainbows and fill them in. I ended up having to do the majority of the decorating at home because we ran out of time. I learned a few things while doing the decorating.

First, if you put a tie over the end of your decorating bag and tie it too tight, there is too much pressure on the end of your bag. The bag will then explode at the bottom and the tip will shoot out into your cake causing a big dent in the base icing. And of course this big dent can't happen when you are decorating the back of the cake. Nope, right in the front.

Second lesson learned is that if I decide to be ambitious and create a border of stars around the bottom of the cake, I should start in the back. This way when I get back to where I began the border, if the sizes and placement of the stars are a bit off, it is not quite as noticable.

All in all though, I think I'm pleased with how the cake came out. I know that if I were to do the same one a second time, it would come out much better. Oh and the plan is to take it to work tomorrow, so I added Happy Tuesday to it. Because Tuesday is happy. Because it is no longer Monday. So without further ado, my cake:

Wilton Cake Baking Classes

I'm going to use this as an easy way to keep all of my cake pictures and share them with people who have said they want to see them.

I started taking the Wilton cake decorating Course 1 at Michaels on Monday, August 3. The first class was just an introduction to the tools we would be using (and needed to purchase) and a quick overview on how to level, tort, and fill a cake, along with how to ice it while trying to get the icing as smooth as possible.

One thing I learned was that if you sign up for the Michaels weekly email, you get a 50% off coupon that you can print off as many times as you want. It does expire though, so you may have to sign up another email address to get a new one. Let's just say that Michael Stratford (who apparently lives on the street next to ours) and Jessica Jones (who apparently lives on my parent's street in a made up number house) signed up for the newsletter. Of course the coupon is only good for one item at a time, so I think I visited all 3 Michaels locations near my house and work at least 3 times each over the last week. But I think I'm all set for supplies now.