Cake Decorating - Week 2

I'm doing two blog posts tonight because I am so excited to show my first cake!

The first week of cake decorating class, there wasn't anything to show. In class, we just went over the lessons, went through the tools in the class kit, learned how to make the "Class Buttercream" icing and how to ice our cakes. One good tip I learned was how to get smooth icing: after you spread the icing, let the cake sit a while until the icing starts to firm up. Take a piece of wax paper and lay it over the top. Run your spatula over the wax paper. Pull up the wax paper and your icing will be smooth! (That is if you wait long enough - I didn't the first time. Humidity can also be a factor - like I can do anything about that in TX!) Do the same thing with strips of wax paper wrapped around the sides of the cake.

So, for Week 2, we had to bake an 8-inch round cake and ice it. In class, we would learn to use the star tip to fill in designs and a thin, round tip to do lines.

I make my cake from a mix. Normally I like to bake from scratch, but someone I know who has taken the class advised me to just use a mix, because there's enough to worry about with getting the icing ready and practicing the techniques without worrying about if the cake is going to come out, and mixes are hard to mess up!

Here is my cake, with the base icing. I give myself a B- for the smoothness.

"Why," you might ask "is it shaped like that?" Well, that would be because the dog ate my homework.

I had baked the cake and put on one coat of icing. Alec and I were in the living room watching the Olympics. I heard a noise in the kitchen and I yelled "River, get down." Here's what happened next:

Alec: What is she [River] doing?

Me: I think she was trying to get on the counter & lick my cake.

Alec walks into the kitchen.

Alec: Um, hon, she didn't just try to lick the cake.

I walk into the kitchen and I see this on the counter:

Yes, that would be my cake, with the icing licked off most of one side, and a big bite out of it. After I panicked for a minute (it was around 9 pm and I didn't really have time or energy to make another cake) I had a brainstorm - the design for the cake in the class book was a rainbow! I could just cut off the part River had licked and the design would still fit! So that's what I did.

In addition to the cake, we had to take a bunch of icing to class. We were supposed to color the icing for the rainbow (I'd misunderstood and thought we were going to do that in class, so all mine was white. But, here are all my containers ready to go:Class went a lot better than I expected. I've tried a little bit of cake decorating to enhance some of my bundt cakes from my patterned pans. I've never done very well. But, I was pleased with my results. I think my rainbow looked really good. I didn't do so well with the border around the bottom, but I don't have a turntable, so it's a little difficult.

Alec took the cake into work today and he said everyone liked it.

Next week, we will learn to make clown figures, and icing roses!