Cake Decorating Part 4

We had our final cake decorating class last night!  I'm sad that it's over as it gave me something to prepare for, think about, and get out of the house to do!  I'm toying with the idea of taking another cake decorating class (there's two more that Michael's runs: flower decorating and fondant).  I don't know if I'm up to the time commitment though, as the weather is getting warmer and I'll be wanting to spend more time outside and less time heating up my house with the oven!

This was our final project week, so we came with a cake already iced.  I used some icing that my FIL gave me but I should have thinned it before I spread it on.  The taste of the icing was delicious (I much prefer it to the stuff I make with the almond flavoring) but I had a tough time trying to smooth out the wrinkles with parchment after.  I think if I would have just left it white instead of coloring it, it would have been less noticeable.  When I layed the parchment on top to smooth it, it just stuck to it and made little pointy peaks when I tried to remove it.

Things I learned this week:

• Writing and printing with icing
• Making ROSES!! (yay!!)  

Making the roses were pretty tough.  It took a while before I got used to the technique but my icing kept cracking.  I either wasn't spinning the flower nail fast enough or wasn't putting enough pressure on the bag and not getting enough icing out.  Out of the 12 I attempted, I had enough to decorate my cake with!  Six turned out pretty good, which is what I needed for my cake, and actually there was a couple other ones that were 'runner ups'.  Camille's roses looked amazing though - she got the hang of it super quick!  She used a hot pink that really stood out compared to my boring white.

Since we've been eating so much cake lately (besides all my baking and cake decorating we had my mom's 50th birthday party on the weekend), I decided I needed to make this for someone instead.  Last time we had people over to have cake (after the 2nd class), they really didn't eat it as I was hoping for.  Okay, yes they ate, but I was left with a half a cake left over that Mike and I inevitable pigged out on.  So for this cake I used my brains and thought "Now who would eat the cake?" and the answer came to me immediately!! "Pregnant people eat cake!!!"  I have a few friends that are pregnant right now so I thought I'd make this for them!  Amanda and Robin came over and we embarrassingly polished it off quite handily. 

There's a lot of things that I wish I would've done differently with the cake but all in all I'm happy with the result.  I wish I would've left the base icing white though and colored the roses instead of the other way around.