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 #13: Happy Birthday, Stephanie

This week, one of my favorite co-workers has her birthday. When I asked her what type of cake she wanted, she requested that I make a large Starbuck's cup. Since I'm not comfortable actually sculpting a cake, I decided to make a stacked cake with a smaller Starbuck's cup of Rice Krispies covered in fondant. However, when I tried to cover the Rice Krispies in fondant, it didn't turn out exactly as planned.

Having to scrap my plans at the last minute, I had to hurriedly re-plan the design. Being slightly unhappy about this turn of events, I simply added a few quick buttercream decorations and called it quits. I'm sure my co-workers will care much more about the inside rather than what's on the exterior!

Cake #10: Stacks and Stacks of Cake

Tonight was the final night of my Wilton Course III: Fondant and Tiered Cakes; for my final project, I made this three-tiered stacked cake. (The top and bottom cakes are chocolate with an Oreo buttercream filling, and the middle cake is lemon with a lemon custard filling.) All three cakes are covered in the Wilton fondant, which I dyed blue.

To decorate the cake, I piped buttercream flowers along the sides and then used a paint brush to soften the edges and give the flowers an embroidered-look (hence the reason this technique is called "brushed embroidery"). To finish the cake, I added a multi-looped fondant bow atop the cake and a ribbon border around the bottom of each cake.

Although I am fairly content with the finished cake, I definitely feel there's lots of room for improvement. I again had difficulty in getting the fondant to smoothly cover the cake; however, I did find that my ability improved as I did each of the 3 cakes. Fortunately, the ribbon borders were a big help in covering some of the mistakes. I also want to comment on the great amount of time and energy I had to invest into this cake. I would say that to bake and decorate this cake took approximately 12 hours! I can understand why wedding cakes are so expensive!!!