Cake Decorating Class

My sister-in-law, Kathy and I decided that we were going to take some cake decorating classes. The first week in class we learned the basics of making icing and baking a cake. We also learned how to use the star tip and deocrated cookies using the star tip.

Our second week in class we had to bake a 8 in. round to bring to class so we could learn to ice it correctly and do gel transfers. We also learned how to make a ribbon rose, pipe dots and do curvey lines.

We didn't have a lot of time to deocrate the cake after we did the gel transfer (which you can see a little of my purple gel if you look at the top of the cupcake) because it took so long for the cakes to harden after we iced them. Also, my wax paper stuck to my icing (which it isn't supposed to do by the way) so my icing is a little lumpy.

Our third week in class we learned how to do drop flowers, shaggy mums, leaves, and puff flowers

Here is my puff flower. My icing wasn't quite stiff enough to stand up like it was supposed to, but overall I think it was pretty good.

Here are my shaggy mums and leaves on top of my cupcakes. I thought they turned out pretty well and they were fun to do.

Next week is our final week of class and we are supposed to fully decorate a cake. I'll keep you posted on how that goes.

Transfromers

My friend Rachael decided that she wanted to make a cake for her son's birthday party and I told her that I would help her with the cake. We decided on making 2 - 12 in. chocolate cakes and 2 - 8 in. white cakes. Racheal found some recipes online for chocolate cream cheese icing and some kind of raspberry icing (I'll have to find out exactly what it was from her.)

Well, the cake making went okay. We got the white cakes made without any problems and 1 of the chocolate cakes made without any problems. The second chocolate cake that I made got stuck in the pan and ended up falling apart when I got it out of the pan. The second attempt went much better. When we started putting the cake together we quickly realized that the chocolate cream cheese icing was not meant to be a filling. Within 20 minutes after putting the second layer on top of the chocolate cream cheese icing the cake started splitting in half and eventually fell right off, so we ended up taking the top layer off, cutting the bottom layer in half and flipping the top part with the icing on it around so it made 2 smaller layers. I did the same for the white cake so it wouldn't be disproportionate.

We decided to try to make the All Spark from the move as a topper for the cake. We made some marshmellow treats and shaped it into a square. We then we had our first run in with fondant and lets just say...it didn't go so well. After I covered the marshmellow treats with fondant I took a skewer and made the marks from the All Spark. I then took glitter dust and brushed it on to the whole thing then took black petal dust and brushed it into grooves to make them stand out.

I wasn't completely happy with the results, but her kid liked it so that's all that matters.

My First Tier Cake

So it's that time again...another birthday party, but this time it was for my niece, Hope. It was her 7th birthday party and since getting a Wii for Christmas last year she has been obsessed with Mario, so she decided she wanted a Mario birthday party. My brother found some cakes online that he thought would be cool for her birthday, but all of them were tiered. The cake we decided on trying to make was a 2 tier cake with the basic scenes from the Mario game. On the original cake that we were basing this off of had miniture Mario characters on it, but we weren't able to find any characters online that we could buy, so my brother found a Mario chess set that he ordered.

I started the cake off with Funfetti cake mix since it had the Marioish colors inside the cake. It took me 6 boxes of cake mix to make 2 - 12 in. layers and 2 - 8 in. layers for the cake. I have to say that these cakes turned out a lot better than my attempts with the Hello Kitty cake. :)

I started working on the cake the Thursday before the party. It took me the majority of the day to bake all of the cakes and letting them cool.

Here is a picture of the cake put together and dirty iced.

Friday after I got off work I iced the cake in a sky blue and started to pipe on the grassy hills. And after a half day of work on Saturday I went home to finish up the cake by piping on the bricks for the stairs to the flag, the flag pole and flag, the mushrooms, stars and coins and the question mark boxes for the mushrooms and coins.

I had a little issue with the coloring of the green icing for the pipe, but you get the point. :)

For the coins and star I bought some yellow edible sparkles.

My awesome question mark boxes. I was super proud of them. :)

I put her initial for the flag to make it a little more special for her.

That completes the 360 view.

Better late than never

So my friend's little sister started a blog to show off her baking skillz and I thought it was a pretty awesome idea, so...here I am.

The first cake I ever did was for my niece, Grace's 5th birthday party. She had been running around since October telling everyone that her Aunt Anna was going to be making her a Hello Kitty cake for her birthday, but since she changes her mind every 5 seconds I didn't really think anything about it until my mom called me the Thursday before the party and asked me if I needed any help with the cake.

This was the first cake that I had ever baked that was larger than just an 8 in. pan. The first 2 cakes I did broke as soon as I tried to take them out of the pan. The 3rd cake I tried to make I got out of the pan in one piece, but ended up cracking later on when I was transporting it. Once I FINALLY got the cake out and partically in one piece I started to put on the icing.

So to start this cake I took her birthday invitation and blew it up on my computer. I printed the paper out and traced it onto the cake with a toothpick once I got the dirty icing on. (Since then I have found out that there is a much easier way to transfer, but like I said before this was my first cake. )

This is a picture of my icing in progress. Originally the invitation had Hello Kitty flying over a city skyline, but since Grace's favorite color is blue ("Hey. I have to tell you something...my favorite color is blue!") I decided that I would put her on a sky blue background to make it look like she was floating through the sky.

Here is a picture after I got all of the icing filled in around Hello Kitty. It took a while to do because most of the spaces were really close together so I actually had to use a toothpick to pull the frosting around and fill in the spots.

I started icing the cake around 7am on the day of the party...while I was work...and finished around 2pm, with 3 hours to spare before the party started. Here is the finished cake at the birthday party.