Bad Cakes and Better Cakes (but still not Good)

Bad Cake
On March 17 I had my third of four cake classes, decorating the second of three cakes we would do in the course. In this class we learned shells and dots, which could be used for decorative touches and borders, as well as to pipe figures like the clown bodies shown above (the heads are little plastic pieces on stems that you stick into the icing). I was having a very "off" night and things did not go quite as well as I felt they had with my first cake-decorating attempt. There were probably a number of factors involved but one of them was definitely the fact that I was not looking forward to doing that week's clown cake. I think clowns are creepy! But I tried to make it fun and used white, green, and orange icing in honor of St. Patty's Day.

For some reason I was having a really tough time doing the shell decoration, which is embarrassing because that is supposed to be a pretty easy one! But they just weren't coming out right. When I went to pipe the shell border on the cake I tried using a color-striping technique, where you paint strips of the dye on the inside of your pastry bag so it makes stripes when you squeeze the icing through it. I used green stripes and white icing. But I was doing so poorly on the border that my teacher actually made me stop (more than once!) and practice on our practice boards before going back to the cake. But in doing so I ended up with noticeable differences in the placement of the color stripes and in the strength of the color on the cake. Towards the end, when I got to the bottom border there is almost no stripe at all! FAIL.

The second FAIL is those awful green dots on the top of the cake. The sample clown cake they showed in the book had dots on the side of the cake, but something was weird with the tackiness/consistency of my icing that night and when I tried to do dots on the side of the cake they were actually falling off!!! So I just sprinkled a bunch of them all over the top of the cake to fill up the empty space around the clowns. Ugh, it's so ugly it seriously belongs on Cake Wrecks. You know what though? Cake is cake, and when I set it out at work the next morning it was gone by lunchtime!

One bright moment in the class happened when I was trying to add hands and feet to the clowns. The icing kind of sputtered out in a weird way on one of the hands, and it looks like the clown is giving a thumbs up!! I couldn't have done that again if I had tried! Everyone got a good laugh out of it.


Better Cake
On March 24 we decorated our "graduation" cake. This class was devoted to learning how to make roses. I thought it would be difficult because of the intricacy involved, but I never considered that I would have trouble due to hand cramps! Seriously, my hand got so tired from squeezing that pastry bag. I had a bunch of trouble with these at first. The icing was cracking, falling off, etc. I couldn't make anything resembling anything close to a flower! But towards the end of class I was able to at least put something together that had multiple petals, despite the fact that they were cracked, stumpy petals. And I was proud of myself for persevering. A lot of women in the class (yes, it was all women) were frustrated as well but one of them went so far as to give up completely.



The cake was decorated with an arrangement of roses on top, and I did dots again which were a little better this week. I will say that doing the leaves on the roses was really easy!

All in all, I did enjoy taking this class, despite my frustrations. I don't think I'll be selling cakes, which some students come out of that class wanting to do, but I think that with a little practice I could get better at this. I am looking forward to making my next cake that is NOT for class and decorating it however I like. I would also like to experiment with using different types of icing as well, because I didn't really like the icing recipe that was used for class.

I learned a lot and now own some supplies that I can use again and again. One conclusion I came to after trying a different brand of cake mix each week is that I felt the Duncan Hines mix made the best cake. I thought Pillsbury was the worst because it was really crumbly. The Betty Crocker mix was somewhere in the middle.

There are three more levels of cake decorating courses offered at the craft store, and I may choose to take another one in the future. For right now though I'm a little "caked out."