Cake #6: Basket o' Flowers

Today was the finale of my Wilton Decorating Course Level II, and we finally combined all our work from the last weeks onto a single cake. This oval cake holds a variety of the royal icing flowers I've made this past month, as well as, the two blue birds I made with color-flow icing.

Tonight, we finished the course with the basket-weave technique along the sides and the rope borders along the top and bottom of the cake. Although the basket-weave technique was slightly more difficult than I had been led to believe, the addition of the borders, flowers, and birds distracts from any flaws which might exist in my weaving.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with the way my cake turned out; I'm definitely looking forward to next week's start of Course III: Fondant & Tiered Cakes.

Icing Like A Flower Pro!

From Left to Right: Daffodils, Primroses, Pansies, Daisies, and Roses

As I mentioned in my last post, I am currently taking the Wilton Cake Decorating Course II. Since we're not actually baking cakes each week, we've had plenty of time to learn new flowers. Last week we learned the basic violets and apple blossoms. Although I had considerable trouble successfully making the flowers in class, with some practice at home I was finally able to master the petal technique, which served as a foundation for this week's lessons.

This week, we learned to make Victorian roses, daises, daffodils, pansies, and primroses. I was completely amazed at how quickly and easily I was able to master each of these flowers! I can't wait until next week when I get to make the grand finale cake with all these flowers...

Cake #5: Happy Birthday, Attempt #2

For the past couple weeks, I've been taking the level 2 Wilton cake decorating course, which focuses on creating flowers with royal icing. Since we're just focusing on the flower techniques, we haven't needed to bake actual cakes for the course; however, since a couple of my coworkers have birthdays to celebrate, I decided to combine some of the new flower techniques with the skills from my last class to get a little more practice.

This cake is a simple 8" torte with basic buttercream frosting. On top of the cake are yellow buttercream roses, pink apple blossoms from royal frosting, and several violets, also, done in royal frosting. Like my last cake, I again attempted using the Wilton writing templates for the letter. Although the icing was a little thicker than ideal, the lettering came out far superior to my previous attempt (the lettering looks much better on the cake than it does in this picture.)

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!)