for the love of icing

I have always enjoyed baking whenever I did it but I secretly wished I knew how to decorate my baking better. For the longest time I wanted to take cake decorating classes so that I could make pretty edible things versus just edible things. My first real effort at decorating a cake was for Maribel's birthday, only for hers I used fondant. It was fun, and I was overall pleased with the results but I still wanted to learn how to make roses and borders and all that fun stuff.  

For my birthday I received Wilton cake decorating classes and I could not have been more excited!!!!!! <<< Hence all the exclimtion marks. There were 4 lessons (once a week) and in each lesson we got to learn a new technique, fun tips, and if you were at my table, a whole lotta laughs....

Lesson 1 was more or less an introductory lesson and we had a little hands on with some prepared icing. We practiced filling the cloth bags with icing and played with couplers and tips. We also practiced on cookies but I ran out of time so I only left with 4 semi decorated cookies. Not worth photographing, I thought. Only 2 made it home....

But I did practice with the star tip and filling a cake in between lessons on this Super Man cake for my SIL's BF. It was a learning process for sure, like make sure you outline the details of the cake after adding the dirty icing or else you won't know where the cape ends and his arm begins. Now he looks like he only works out one side of his body like, a science experiment. 

Lesson 2 was to bring in a cake to ice and decorate. We learned how to ice the cake all pretty and smooth-ish and practiced with some round tips. I chose the cupcake pattern because in the book it looked super cute and fun...um yeh....not so much with my cake. After adding the carefully squeezed confection goodness it ended up looking like a pile of icing intestines or a nest of baby mice...you pick.   

Sooooo I should have paid more attention when picking my colours for my icing..... It wasn't until it was too late that I realized what I had done. Of course Joe got excited when he noticed and asked, "Ooo you made me a cake?" I was starting to feel like my goal of making "pretty edible things" still needed some work.

Lesson 3 we got to decorate some cupcakes like flowers. Yay, right? I actually felt like I was making some progress. Definitely a step up since the boobie cake from the previous class.

Can you tell which one Maribel had her eye on? Yes, I totally let her have a cupcake before bed.

Lesson 4 was the final lesson where I learned how to make ribbon roses from icing. As a kid I always favoured the corner pieces of cakes because that was where the most icing was with some flowers. Since my final cake was round I made sure that my piece was from the left side of the cake...

So now that the classes are finished I received a lovely certificate showing that I now have some mad skills with an icing bag and I'm not afraid to use it! I loved this class and would recommend it to anyone who wants to take their cake decorating skills to the next level above  just smearing canned icing with a butter knife, which was me last month.

Next up is the Gum Paste and Fondant class. Stay tuned as this should prove to be interesting....