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.