Cake Decorating Part 3

Last week we had to make two batches of icing and color each one a different color.  We also had to make six cupcakes to decorate.  The other week when I made my cake, I just made my cupcakes with the rest of the cake batter!  Saved some time!  I reallllly enjoyed last week, decorating cupcakes is so easy.  You just have to have the right tip on your piping bag and you can make those swirly cupcake tops like you see in the cupcake shops!  EASY!  The flowers were really fun to make too!  I hope I remember how to do this for this week, as it's our final project.  We have to come with our cake already iced, so we'll see how that goes!

Star Flower

Shaggy Mum

Things I learned this week:

• how to fill a cupcake (filled it with vanilla pudding, yum)
• how to make the pretty swirly top
• how to make leaves
• how to make a shell border
• how to make star flowers
• how to make pompom flowers
• how to make shaggy mums (takes like 1/3 cup icing per cupcake!)

Miraculously, I didn't spend any more money to ad to my budget.  Bonus!  Clean up after still took like 45 minutes, but atleast I was able to get my piping bags clean on the first try this time.  Last week I rewashed them like three times, which really added to the total clean up time!!  This was my favorite week yet! 

PomPom Flower is middle right with two shades of blue icing on top of pink swirl

                                                 

My FIL gave me a bunch of icing, shortening, icing sugar, meringue powder, and piping gel!!  So that will greatly decrease the cost of cake decorating in the future!!  Up until now, I've only had to buy one 3-cup package of shortening, and it's lasted the whole course!! (plus the tub of icing I had to buy at the start).  Maybe I should be practicing more??

Cake Decorating Part 2

For some reason it won't allow me to post
the pic right side up! 

I had my second cake decorating class on Thursday night and had a blast! We brought a cake and the icing already made. Thank goodness for my cake caddy, otherwise it would have been a real pain trying to haul it there and back!

In this class we learned and practiced:

• how to do circles (haha, yes, there's a trick to doing circles), and how to drag the circles to make designs such as hearts or in this case, the cupcake bottom on my design.
• how to cut a cake in half perfectly (use a cake leveler, which I now bought)
• how to ice the middle of a cake
• how to ice the top and sides of the cake and smooth out the design
• how to transfer a design with icing gel. You trace the design on parchment paper with the gel in a piping bag and the pattern underneath!

I really enjoyed icing and decorating the cake in this class but I felt really really rushed. Like I didn't feel I had enough time to smooth out my icing properly, and then it has to set for 15 minutes (which it didn't have enough time to do), and then I had extra work to try and smooth it and I was rushing so I kept jamming the spatula into the edges, making it look really messy. I'm 75% happy with the result, but just know I could've done so much better if time would have permitted!!

You can see where I gouged out the edge all along here! It was smooth at one point. Also, the white beads around the bottom I piped on in the last 45 seconds of class! So they're not even but I think the cake looked a lot better with a little bit more detail!

Updated Cost List:

Cake Leveler ($5.49 reg price) $4.40

Piping gel ($5.99 reg price) $3.59

Total = $74.05