Adventures in Cake Decorating

During the month of March, I participated in a Wilton cake decorating class at my local Michael's. It was a basic intro to cake decorating course, so of course I had to amass an obscene amount of tools and gadgets. Right up my alley! Anyway, we made 2 cakes and one batch of cupcakes over 4 classes. These are the cakes I made, the cupcakes were nothing special as we were basically just messing around trying out new techniques (read: not cute or pretty). The first cake (made for class 2) is a rainbow cake. It's 2 vanilla cake layers filled and frosted with vanilla buttercream and decorated with a star-tip rainbow. Pretty easy to make and overall a good, fast effect. Not bad for my first decorated cake!

Oh, the rainbow isn't just off-center, I was supposed to put some Happy Birthday writing underneath it, but, well, I didn't feel like it.

This next cake is also all vanilla. It was made for the forth class, which I didn't actually attend as it was a very stormy and tornado-y night. I had all the cake and frosting ready to go, however, so I just followed the directions in my class book and winged it. We had been working on the beginning of the rose in class, so I had to teach myself the rest of it. It was actually pretty fun! My roses are a little ragged, but not bad for a first time. I'll work on it. I like the shell border and I will definately use that on future cakes.


I had a good time taking the class, but I'm not sure that I will take any of the other three that are offered. All the tools get expensive and the instructors want you to use the Wilton frosting recipe, which uses Crisco instead of butter (in buttercream (!)). It was not tasty. I think I may just purchase the other course books off of Amazon ($3-4/book) and teach myself the other techniques I want to learn. I am glad I learned a bit about decorating though, my future baking projects will be that much more glam!