Wilton Course 4 - The Final Final!

Well this is it. The final cake class, the final exam, the final cake! There are no more courses after this one. This course we worked with fondant and gum paste. I had hoped for no contact with vile buttercream, but alas, there still was some. It was limited, but still the disgusting concoction of shortening, powdered sugar, fake butter flavoring, and meringue powder continues to haunt me. Gross.

In class the week before the final final, we made several different flowers from a gum paste/fondant mixture. I was actually rather pleased with them. Here are my daisies...


Cute huh? And here is my carnation. A carnation is pretty labor intensive, with several steps involved. But I was very happy with my outcome. I painted the tips with food coloring and the picture shows that it's still a little wet, but all in all, a pretty decent effort here.


Now as I prepare for the final final, I had to make a cake, fill it, frost it and then cover it with fondant. The decorating would take place in class. Here we go again! Boxed cake mixes are not my friend! I baked it, cooled it and then planned on trimming and freezing it. Well the trimming went fine. But when I picked up the layer to place it in plastic wrap to freeze, that is when the problem arose. The cake fell apart in my hands!


Urgh! It didn't seem like it was all that fragile. It was completely cooled. These dang things just don't like me. They're sick of me talking smack behind their backs about making scratch cakes and leaving them on the shelves. It's payback I tell you! It's a boxed cake mix revolt!! They'll show me, and they sure did!

Well, I smooshed the cake back together and wrapped it up tightly, determined to get what I needed out of this damn thing, which was a canvas for the decorations to come. The second layer stayed intact. Thank goodness.

When I took the cakes out of the freezer a few days later to prepare for class, the broken cake stayed together, fused by freezing. I would use it as the bottom.


With no other real options I filled the inside of the cake with vile buttercream, then iced the whole thing with the nasty stuff too.



Then rolled out my fondant and began the smoothing process.


It smoothed pretty well, and so I was ready to head to class for the... say it with me, final final.

The first part of class we learned how to make a fondant candy box. You can make this and put it on top of a cake and fill it with M&M's or jellybeans or tiny fondant flowers. Whatever floats your boat. Me, I think it's kind of ugly. Well, no... not ugly but just not something I would put on top of a cake.


Granted, I took the photo before it was totally dry and the lid would be stiffer, but still. Meh, just not my thing. It came out good though.

So now it's time to decorate our final cake. I had a plan and I was only mildly confident I could pull it off. But I wanted to do it. It was my last hurrah! I had to give it a shot. So I found a photo, I found black fondant and I got to work! Since my classmate Jill decided to be a slacker and not even bother to make a cake for the final (HA!) I put her to work on the border for my cake. And while we only got halfway finished in the time that was left of class, I am rather pleased with the result!


Oh yeah it's a zebra striped cake! Black fondant is a little messy and if you use the gum glue (made from a small amount of gum paste and water) as adhesive, it can bleed the black into the cake. But all and all, it is my tour de force!

Thanks to Jill for the help. Your balls are magnificent lol. Thanks to Alicia for putting up with me for 4 courses. And to all the other ladies I've met along the way. It was great fun, thanks for putting up with my cursing and my constant chatter. Alas, I don't think I'll ever be hired by Duff or Buddy. But it was fun and I did learn a lot =)

My Very Own Cake Wreck! Wilton Course 4, Class 2

Thank goodness I'm not a professional or my debacle may have actually ended up on Cake Wrecks! It all started out pretty good, and ahead of schedule I might add. Class is Thursday night and I made the cake on Tuesday. And I will say right here and right now, yes I should have frozen the layers. I didn't. In fact, I never even thought of it. But I'm putting it out there. I should have frozen it. So with that out of the way, the cake in question was a Duncan Hines banana cake. Generally if you read this blog regularly you know that I won't touch these class cakes with a ten foot pole. I hate vile buttercream and fondant isn't any better. But someone eats it so I do want to make sure it's edible. So without further ado, here is the cake that wasn't.

It started out all nice, cake trimmed and vile buttercream around the edge so the filling doesn't seep out.


So far, so good. I planned on filling it with vanilla pudding. OK, maybe a little too much vanilla pudding but that isn't exactly the problem.


Once the top cake is put in place, this is when bad stuff starts to happen. There's a crack on top, but I blob the vile buttercream on and start to spread.



It really doesn't want to spread, even though the consistency is good and not too stiff. The cake is starting to come off in big chunks and the pudding is oozing out a little.



As I frantically try and get the vile buttercream to hold the cake together, it's becoming more and more clear that it's just not happening!


The cake is a mess. It's fallen apart. There's no way at this point to salvage it.



What an absolute mess. There is only one thing left to do.


Toss that sucker in the trash!

Wilton Course 3 - The Final Exam!

Just in time for the next class to start, I bring you my final exam from Course 3 - Fondant and Tiered Cakes. Be afraid, and if it's too much, please look away!

First of all, this course had the most homework of any of the previous courses. Seriously. Before the final class we had to have a 9 or a 10 inch layer cake, a 6 inch layer cake, both iced and covered in fondant, they also needed to have their dowels in place. In addition to all that, we needed to bring some vile buttercream, 20-30 fondant roses and a bunch of fondant leaves.

Starting with the cake, since Nick and I will not touch anything that has that vile buttercream on it, I don't really bother making a cake from scratch for class. This week I used a Pillsbury fudge cake mix and I would say I will never use this cake mix again. As far as boxed cake mixes go, it's fine. It tastes decent and is very moist. Which is kind of the problem, it's very very moist. Which makes icing it kind of a nightmare. And I made it even more moist. I couldn't think of anything to use as a filling so while searching my pantry and refrigerator for something I found a bottle of maraschino cherries. I brushed each trimmed layer with the juice and then put the cherries in the middle of the cake.



Someone was most likely going to eat this cake so I didn't want it to have an empty center. That's just cruel! But then, icing it. No matter how many times I cleaned off my spatula, no matter how many times I tried to scrape the cake, it came out looking like a horrible crumby mess.


In the end though, it just didn't matter since I was covering the iced cake in fondant. So I rolled it out and got to work on smoothing the fondant over the cake.


I did ok, but ran into one little problem area.


I decided to make due with it though. Then I did it all again with the 6 inch cake. Yep, another crumby mess.


Booooo ghosty cake!


Nice, smooth. Just don't look at the other side ok?


Dammit! I told you not to look!


After getting both cakes covered, then I had to put the dowels in the 9 inch cake and get the dowels cut so they weren't sticking out by 5 inches in the cake.


So, armed with 20 fondant roses that looked really bad (I could not get my edges to ruffle and now realize that I needed to roll the fondant a bit thinner), no leaves because I forgot to make them, 2 cakes, vile buttercream and all the other supplies, I'm ready to head to class and put this final exam cake together!


The class mainly consisted of putting our tiered cake together and decorating it. As it turns out, my dowels didn't like up right with the pillars for the cake, so I had to move them.


It really wasn't much of a problem though because vile buttercream in the holes make it look pretty seamless, and plus the flowers were going to go over most of the area. So I started by putting the two cakes together with the pillars between them.



Then it was time to start piping the vile buttercream onto the cake so the roses would stick to the cake.


When the flowers were going to be on the side, a toothpick was added to insure they wouldn't fall off.


Once all the flowers were on, I had to color some of the vile buttercream green so that I could pipe on some leaves.




I also decided to make the border stars, yeah, because it's the easiest one. You caught me there. And then I decided to add more stars. The funny thing is, I've seen Buddy on Cake Boss say many times, "The more I added to that cake, the better it looked" and that really proved to be true. In the end, even though I was disappointed with my roses and I didn't get the fondant completely smoothed out in some areas, I was actually pretty happy with the look of the final product.

Halloweeny Cakey Blog!

Now this is far more my style.

Several years ago I was at a garage sale and found a set of skull cake pans.

I had to have them. They were just too fun to pass up. Well they sat in a box for the next few years. But when I came up with an idea on how to ice them a few days ago, I decided to give them a try.

Because I wanted to make them edible, I decided to use my favorite chocolate cake recipe. This recipe makes two very big layers or four smaller layers. The skull pans are kind of small so I decided to make cupcakes with the leftover batter. The very cupcakes mentioned in the previous blog that hit the ground! Thank goodness it wasn't all of them though. I did keep about 10 at home, which Nick ended up taking to work. Aren't they cute!?



So, skull cakes. I used Crisco cooking spray on the pans and that was a mistake. The cakes stuck to the pan and basically were ruined.



Poor skull on the right totally had his face eaten off. The one on the left was OK... but still not great. If I had some actual talent I could have made this a zombie cake with it's face eaten off, but I really had no idea how to pull that off. And I still wanted to implement the idea I had so I baked another cake. I didn't use the original recipe though because I didn't have all the necessary ingredients now. Instead I made a mayonnaise cake because I did have all the ingredients for it. And this time I buttered and floured my cake pans. I melt the butter and brush the pans with a pastry brush, and then sprinkle the pans with flour. I'm not taking any chances for another sticking disaster!

It worked! The cakes came out of the pan perfectly and all the detail was showing. So here's my idea. I would cover the cakes with a white chocolate ganache (12 oz white chocolate, 1/2 cup of heavy cream - heat cream, pour over white chocolate, let set for 3 minutes, whisk until all the chocolate is melted, stir in Tablespoons of softened unsalted butter until smooth). While the ganache was still warm, but not hot, pour it over the cakes so it makes a glaze, covering the cakes in white chocolate.



Refrigerate and let the ganache set. Then, using a store bought black icing, because black is just too hard to make, fill in the detail. I started with the eyes.


From there I did the mouth. To do the mouth I squirted some of the icing out into a bowl and used a toothpick to fill in the teeth.


I don't have the steadiest hand, but I was honestly quite impressed that I did this well!

I contemplated not filling in the nose, but it looks a bit too much like an alien without the nose so I went ahead and did the nose too. But honestly, if you make green icing, this would be a pretty good alien.



Happy Halloween Everyone!!!! Oh and don't worry about the skull cakes that stuck to their pans. See all that ganache glaze in the bottom of the pan above? That was salvaged and gets melted down and poured over delicious hunks of chocolate cake. YUM.

Wilton Cake Decorating Class. Course 1, Week 3

Last night was week 3 of the Wilton Cake Decorating Course 1 class. This was probably the most fun of all the classes so far. We did a lot and covered a lot of ground from shell borders, to the rose base, to dot borders to evil clowns. But more on that a little later.

This week we had the choice of either making cupcakes or a cake. I decided that to make a cake because I wanted to practice icing it. I chose a Duncan Hines Chocolate Fudge Cake. I make cake from time to time. I know how to make cake. I've made many many cakes. Rarely, ok never, are they boxed mix cakes. And never have I ever burnt a cake (OK, except this one time). But on my second time ever making a boxed cake, I burned the dang thing! I set the timer and left the room and then after a little while, I started to smell, not the heavenly aroma of chocolate baking, but a much more acrid smell. Oh no, this was not good! I got the cakes out immediately with only minimal damage. And since this was a practice cake, I didn't feel the need to remake it. So I let them cool. And armed with an almond filling, I continued. As I mentioned in my previous blog, I used the handy dandy cake leveler and then put the disgusting frosting around the edge and then put in the almond filling.




After leveling off the second layer, I placed it on top and pushed it down and there you have it. My burned chocolate almond layer cake.



Now I have to frost it with you know what, and hope for a better result than last week. On the suggestion of several readers, I decided to first do a very thin layer of icing on the cake called a crumb coat. This is supposed to take care of any of the crumbs that come off the cake and seal them to the cake. So I did that and then put the cake in the fridge to let the crumb coat harden a little. After about 40 minutes or so, I took the cake out and frosted it for real. Check it out! No crumbs!




Off to class I go, crumb free burned cake in hand. And as previously mentioned, we did a lot of practice. That two hours goes by fast so with a mere half an hour left, it was time to get to the *gasp* clowns! Our teacher Alicia showed us how to make the clown body, arms, legs, feet and hands. And then we were on our own. We could make clowns or we could just do more practice. Well dammit, I was making clowns!

With a number 21 tip, it is actually rather simple to make the clown. I used a parchment paper bag and painted up the side with green food coloring then filled my bag with the aforementioned gross buttercream icing. I didn't feel the need to buy the clown heads for any reason at all, so I borrowed Patty's (my sister in law, who is also taking the class) just so I could have the completely look to document. Here are my evil clowns!




With very little time to spare before class ended, I tried my hand at making the shell border. That didn't work out very well. But that is definitely something I will need more practice on.







Next week is week four, our final week. We will be making roses and I'm ascared! I sense disaster in the making. But we'll just have to see. Maybe I'll surprise myself :)

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!