Wilton Cake Decorating Class

As evidenced by this cake , I had very little experience decorating cakes, so a month back Neha & I started the Wilton's Cake Decorating Course One, needless to say, it was a lot of butter cream!

I started the course with some basic cake decorating knowledge and now I almost feel like pro ;) We learnt a whole variety of things - butter cream icing, borders, flowers, dots, and hearts and not to forget the rose.

However I have really mixed feelings about my whole experience. I surely did feel like I learned things, but my biggest issue was our instructor Lisa. She is a nice lady and I wouldn't have disliked her so much in a normal day to day environment, but I hated her as a teacher. She was uninterested and uninspiring and never explained things as well or as detailed as she should have. She would also rush us through our classes. All in all, she didn't teach well.

But we had the book and time to learn by trial and error and we surely did a good job at that.

Class One

Neha and I attended our first class on 7th Sep 2010 and it sure did make us giggle a lot because we were probably the only two people out of the 10 students who had no experience in cakes, icing or anything like that ;)

Anyways we managed to suppress our giggles and learn all we possibly could about how to prepare a cake for decorating; from baking, leveling, torting, filling and icing the cake. Lisa also showed us how to make some stupid looking fishes (yeah personally i felt the fish looked like it had a bad lip augmentation done). She also showed us how to make some creepy looking clowns; Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the clowns especially not after those scary clown movies :(

Later we were asked to frost and decorate some cookies :)

Class Two

While first class was more of an introduction to how to make frosting and a discussion of what the class would cover, second class was all hands-on, and we had to ice and decorate an 8"cake.

First we learned how to smoothly frost the cake. We also learned how to do a pattern transfer, using piping gel and then fill in the pattern or rather just a few of us learnt since Neha and I chose to make our own designs (see I told u I was already practicing to be a pro). We also learned how to make "scary" clowns for like the hundredth time (she taught us to make clowns in every class).

Here's the finished cake and I surely don't think it's too bad for a first attempt. It went to work with Subhash a day after and they all liked it or at least that is what they all said ;)

Class Three

For the third class, we were asked to bring six cupcakes. During this class, we learned how to make shell borders, drop flowers, rosette, shaggy mum, pom pom flowers. Since my frosting was a little thinner, it was easier for me to make these on the practice board, in fact my icing was soo thin that my pom pom flower fell out of the flower nail while all i could do was sit there and stare at the disaster.

Once we had practiced well we were asked to fill in our cupcakes and decorate them with the classic swirl or the flowers we had learnt that day. Well not to forget we also had a session of making the infamous clown (Please stop it now!!!)

Here is what I managed to do with my cupcakes in the 15 minutes that Lisa gave us to decorate the cupcakes.

Class Four

So when I first signed up for cake decorating class, I knew the one thing I had to come away with was how to make a rose and this was like my dream day

In this class Lisa (Well she was a very different lady today, all sweet and helpful ...hmmm) showed us how to make the ribbon rose, But for some reason it took me over an hour to get the hang of making my ribbon rose. I don't know what it was but I just could not get it to work for me (I kept envying Neha who made awesome roses like a pro). Anyways by the time I managed to kind of make a ribbon rose the heat kicked in and my icing started melting and the so my “not so ribbony” ribbon roses fell apart. Anyways I was able to save 5-6 roses which I put on the cake and the final cake looked pretty good.

On a concluding note all the stuff we learnt in our 4 week course is surely not rocket science, but it's also not something that most people can do! During the last one month I practiced, and practiced, and then practiced some more (yeah even while sleeping). I'm not kidding, at one point Subhash wanted nothing to do with the site of frosting and trust at that time i was not even half satisfied with my skills ;) However like I said earlier, as of today I feel like a pro, well maybe not good enough to compete on the Food Network Challenge, but I am surely very proud of my small achievement!