Cake #20: Raspberry Disaster

With the extreme heat of the Arizona summer, it's hard to get inspired to bake; however, since it has been over a month since my last caking adventure, I decided to finally head back to the kitchen.

I had seen this cute raspberry cake in one of the Wilton instruction books and thought it would be a fun and easy cake to try...boy was I wrong!

My problems arose from the usage of a whipped cream icing. Although I had never worked with it, it seemed simple enough (after all the recipe was basically just heavy cream and a couple tablespoons of sugar.) Unfortunately, I believe the cream just couldn't stand up to the heat of the Sonoran Desert - literally! No matter how hard I whipped the cream or how long I left it in the fridge, it just wouldn't remain stiff. When I tried to frost the cake, the whipped cream just wouldn't spread... and that which did stick to the sides just sank to the cakeboard moments later. I repeatedly tried chilling the cake, but nothing seems to work.

Fortunately, the vines and leaves did distract from the general sloppiness of the base layer; however, by adding the red raspberries, I was quickly able to lower the cake back to its original horridness. The fresh raspberries were dipped in red sugar, which didn't stick to the raspberries at all! Sadly, I didn't learn this lesson until after I added the first couple raspberries and scattered red sugar crystals all over the top of my cake.

Finally, due to the weakness of the whipped cream, the raspberries on the sides are completely too heavy and keep falling off...why did I bake again??? Looks like I need to stick to buttercream!!!

Cake #16: Fondant and Gumpaste Finale

Tonight was my final Wilton cake class. Although I'm somewhat glad to be finished (not having the pressure of having to bake a cake each Monday and not lugging all my boxes of cake decorating supplies to Michaels), I'm going to be at a loss without my weekly cake instruction. I guess I'll just have to set up a cake schedule for myself...I definitely have a lot of ideas I'd like to try! Thank God for Cake Central!

For my finale cake, I decided to make several new gumpaste flowers from the Wilton gumpaste kit I recently purchased. I made a handful of pink orchids, which were extremely time consuming; unfortunately, they are also extremely fragile, so most of my orchids broke before I could even attach them to my cake. I also made numerous blue sweet peas, which proved to be much easier than the orchids! I had hoped to make many, many more flowers than actually ended up on the cakes, but with the extra difficulty of the gumpaste flowers that just didn't materialize. I'm sure the people at work won't mind!

Cake #4: Happy Birthday Kirby

Since it was my younger brother's birthday is this weekend, I decided to make him a special birthday cake. I had originally intended to make this cake orange (which is my brother's favorite color) with white decorations; unfortunately, I couldn't create an orange with the yellow and red coloring I had, so he'll have to settle for a peach cake.

I had also planned on writing "Happy Birthday" on the cake using some of the Wilton templates and then tracing them with icing. Although I had no trouble getting the template to imprint in the cake's icing, actually tracing the lettering proved quite difficult. The template's lettering was extremely small and compact, so the end-product looking extremely messy. Fortunately, I was able to scrape most of this frosting from the cake's surface and replace it with the rose motif I had used in my previous cake. (I will congratulate myself on successfully mastering the roses. With icing that was actually the correct consistency this time, I was able to complete all seven roses for this cake in less than 15 minutes!)

Cake #3: Everything's Coming Up Roses

This cake has a mound of seven pink buttercream roses with small (tip #352) green leaves. Although I practiced making the roses for several hours and had the technique fairly well-mastered, the texture of my icing was somehow working against me when I attempted them in class. I made at least two dozen roses in order to get even one or two of the above roses...thank God I had made some in advance! To finish this cake, I simply added the basic shell border (tip #21) along the bottom and completed the look with small white dots (tip #3).