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!)

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).

Cake #2: Drop Flowers Galore!

For this basic white cake with buttercream frosting, I used the #2D tip to create a variety of blue flowers with #3 dots in the center. Although these are a fairly easy flower to create, I had some difficulty with the drop flower tip; I believe I would have had better luck if I had been using the tip specially-made for left-handers ! To finish the cake, I added a simple shell border along the bottom with the #21 tip.

Although decorating this cake was fairly easy, I could definitely use some more practice on my drop flowers. This past week, I spent most of my practice time working on the roses for my cake next week...guess I should have taken a moment or two to work on the borders. Hopefully my practice will pay off next week when I attempt to decorate with roses!

Cake #1: I'm a Star!

For my first decorating experience, I iced an 8" round French Vanilla cake (from a mix) in white buttercream frosting. For the decoration, I used a "star" cookie cutters to imprint the large star shapes on top the cake. I, then, outlined the stars in yellow buttercream using the #3 tip. To complete the cake, I used the #16 tip to fill the stars and the #18 tip to create the borders.

Although the cake ended up looking alright, I had a major problem with the base-layer of white buttercream. Apparently, I added too much water to my icing recipe. When I first iced my cake, there was no problem; however, when I opened my cake cover the next day at class, most of the icing along the sides had sagged and a clear sugary-liquid had oozed from the icing onto the cake board. Fortunately, the yellow borders distract (or at least cover) this problem.

Hopefully, more practice with the basic tips (and a thicker icing) will make for a more successful second attempt.