Wilton Cake Decorating Class. Course 1, Week Two

I didn't bother posting about week one since it was mainly an infomercial for Wilton products. But we were also shown how to make the disgusting pseudo buttercream frosting that is used for the class and how to ice a cake. For the second week we were to bring an already iced cake of our choice. Now, it goes against my grain to make a cake from a boxed mix, but when you're just going to practice on it, what's the point of going all out to make a cake from scratch. Especially since I sure as hell won't want to eat it after slathering it with that vile faux buttercream.

So I opted for a lemon cake mix with some canned raspberry filling. Check this out. It's just so very very wrong.




After the cake is baked and cooled, I used the coolest tool ever... the cake leveler. This is used to make your cakes nice and even and get rid of that hump that inevitably grows on top of the cake when you bake it.




And viola!!! Even cake! (The picture doesn't look real even, but it is, trust me.)



So now it's time to make the *shudder* buttercream. I shit you not when I say that this is what the recipe consists of:

2 cups of shortening
2 lbs of powdered sugar
4 Tablespoons of water
2 Tablespoons of meringue powder
2 teaspoons of clear vanilla extract
2 teaspoons of clear butter flavoring
pinch of salt

Seriously. Do you want to eat that? I don't.



From there I divide up the icing so I can change it's consistency. I need 3 cups of thin (add 2 teaspoons of water for each cup of icing), 2 cups of medium (1 teaspoon of water per cup of icing) and 1 cup of stiff (no water added).

I took some of the icing, filled the pastry bag and ran a border around the cake to hold in the filling. Then put my raspberry filling in.


Then put the second layer, after using my nifty leveler again, on top and pressed it down. Cool beans! Nothing seeped out at all!



Now for the icing. I will not lie and say this was easy. It wasn't, and I cursed quite a bit. In class, our teacher Alicia made it look so easy. But I got crumbs all over it and was trying to scrap them off and put more icing on and then just succeeded in getting more crumbs on it. But eventually I got it to a point I could live with. Yes, you can still see crumbs, but it is what it is.




Off to class we go. And for the first half we just used a practice pad and traced designs, made stars and then we made the rose base (which looks like a volcano, or a Hershey kiss). Then we had a choice of what we'd like to put on a cake. We were basically doing designs with the star tip so we made outlines of a flower and then filled them in with stars. So here's the start of my flowers.




My cake is still white, but the flowers are yellow. The fluorescents in the classroom kind of made a yellow wash to the photos. Here's my finished product.




I think it's safe to say, I suck at cake decorating. But I hope to improve!