Wilton Decorating Basics: Lesson 4

And here's my final cake!

This time I did a chocolate cake with chocolate butter cream icing. The roses are almond/vanilla flavored butter cream and the middle layer is filled with raspberry jam.  To be honest, part of the motivation behind trying the chocolate butter cream was because I was kind of terrified to get ugly crumbs in the white icing. I'm happy with my decision - the chocolate butter cream is delicious!

Surprisingly, the "ribbon roses" aren't terribly difficult to do. My biggest issue is that the edges of mine aren't very smooth and I'm not sure why.I actually like the way mine look though. (I'm sure you can tell which one the instructor did for me! Haha!)

And that's the end of my Wilton cake decorating adventure. I really enjoyed my experience and can't wait to try some designs on my own. I'll be sure to post pictures as a do the projects!

To relive the first three lessons, check them out here:
Lesson 1
Lesson 2
Lesson 3

Wilton Decorating Basics: Lesson 3

For the third class, we decorated cupcakes! I went with chocolate cupcakes with orange/vanilla flavored butter cream icing.

We learned to use a lot of the tips and how to make many different flowers.

Drop Flower:

The icing was a little too thin here so they look a bit messy.

These came out better. They also look nice as a cake border.

Rosette:

These rosettes look cute covering the top of the cupcake!

They also look cute as the center of a flower.

Pompom Flower:

Shaggy Mum and leaves:

Next week we learn roses for our last lesson. Stay tuned to see my final cake!

Missed my posts about the first two lessons?
Check them out here: Lesson 1 and Lesson 2.

Wilton Decorating Basics: Lesson 2

For the second class, we had to bake a cake at home to ice and decorate in class. I was very nervous about making sure my cake was flat on top but I researched some at-home remedies for this because I wasn't ready to invest in Bake-Even Strips yet. I ended up making some of my own after reading this. I still got a bit of a dome but was able to fix it by pressing down on the dome with my hand (and parchment paper).

Icing the cake when rather well. I was very nervous about getting crumbs in my white icing, but the crumb coat technique works very, very well! Do a thin layer of icing first to lock in the crumbs, so when you put on the top coat there wont be any crumbs. We learned to transfer patterns on to the cakes. I chose to do a hibiscus flower. It was actually pretty easy to do, but this was a fairly simple image.

In case you're interested, the butter cream icing is flavored with vanilla and lime, the cake was vanilla, and the middle layer was filled with apricot jam! Yummy!

Can't wait to see what we'll do next! Stay tuned...

Want to see what we did last week? Check out my post about Lesson 1.

Wilton Decorating Basics: Lesson 1

This past Monday I began taking Wilton Method Course 1: Decorating Basics class at my local Michael's store! It's something I've been wanting to try for a while now. I've tried to teach myself how to use a pastry bag many times to no avail so I figured it might be best for me to take a class and learn it the right way. I've only had one class, but think I'm getting more comfortable with it already. Probably the biggest thing I've learned so far is that even just baking the cakes is much more complicated than I thought -- especially if you want it to be a perfect, bakery-style cake!

We learned how to frost a cake and also how to make stars with the pastry bag. These are photos of my practice cookies!