Mom and Dad's 30th Anniversary

It was Mom and Dad's 30 year anniversary in February so I made them a little cake to celebrate. This one was only a 6 inch round cake since it was just for the two of them. I ended up doing a red velvet cake with cream cheese icing. On top I put some royal icing lillies and on the side I did little swirls.

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 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.