Jan 19 2008
Cake Decorating - Round Two
This past Wednesday, Ekrina and I had our second cake decorating class. There is a lot more prep work involved in taking a cake decorating class than I’d originally expected. It turns out they don’t supply a prepared cake for you to start honing your decorating skills on. Prior to class you have to bake the cake you will be decorating. Then you must prepare the frosting for frosting the cake and to use for piping decorations during class. And finally frost the cake. I baked two round cakes for the class and cut the center out of one so that Ekrina could have her own “mini” cake to decorate during the class. In the process of frosting the cake, I learned that it is a bad idea to use frosting that is too thick or “stiff” as this will pull the crumbs up from the cake and result in the frosting on the cake looking “crumby”. Somehow we finally did make it to class with our two prepared, although nowhere-near-professional looking, cakes.
We spent the first half of the class practicing piping different patterns - small stars which are primarily used to fill in patterns/shapes on cakes, zig-zag lines, and finally writing on a practice board. A practice board is basically this plastic yellow board that has a clear sheet (the sheet looks and feels like a sheet protector) and you put a guide/sample pattern sheet underneath the clear sheet to basically trace the patterns with frosting. Unlike a really cake, the practice board is easily wiped clean when you make a mistake so it was a good place to start. We also were taught the first step to making the “Wilton Rose” which is piping out this blob of frosting that looks like a Hershey’s kiss. The blob will be the base for the rose and we will learn how to pipe the rose petals and attach them to this base in future classes.
Once we finished practicing, it was time to start the decorations that would go on top of the cake. The first step for our class 2 cake project was to transfer a pattern from a guide sheet to the cake. This is done by taking a sheet of parchment paper and placing it over the pattern, then tracking the pattern onto the parchment paper by using a paintbrush and piping gel. After the pattern is traced you then take the parchment paper and turn it over onto to the top of the frosted cake and rub it in to transfer the pattern to the cake. Our pattern was of a rainbow and the whole transfer process seemed to work well. Piping gel is clear so it only put the faintest of outlines onto the cake and gave us a guide to fill in. The final step in this process was to fill in the rainbow with different shades of frosting. I think that piping the filler (I have no idea what the technical term for this is) was the most fun. You just use different color frostings and pipe in these miniature star shapes until your pattern is full and the end product resembles what the sample cake in your instruction book is supposed to look like.
Here is the end result:
