Wilton Level III Final Cake

In this post, I showed you the royal icing Easter Lilies I made to prepare for my final cake for the Level III Class. We completed our cakes on Wednesday night. We could take the cakes covered with fondant and finish them there. I made my own marshmallow fondant that I told you about here. It worked pretty well. At class, I assembled the two cakes, put on the garland and string work along with the ruffle along the bottom, and then placed the Easter Lilies. It was fun!

This cake didn't turn out as perfect as I had planned. I had more practice with all the others. Why would I make tiered cakes for practicing? Who needs that much cake? Anyway, I found out that royal icing works better for the garland and string work on the sides, and I was trying to do it with buttercream. My homemade fondant wasn't quite right, because I did something out of order when making it. (My 3-year old was in rare form that day. I think I was chasing him around the house every 30 seconds cleaning up his trail of messes. Hence, my attention span for my cake was not very long at any one point in the day. He didn't nap either. Grrrr.) Anyway, it's done.

Happy Easter! Thanks for stopping by!

Jill's Cake

My sister has been telling me that she wants me to make her a cake now that I'm taking cake decorating classes. However, we will not be visiting at her birthday. When we were all at our parents' house last weekend, I baked her a cake. I took all my decorating supplies and tools along to PA so I could.

Jill likes bright, bold colors, and she wanted lots of flowers. Unfortunately, many of the flowers I've been making are royal icing flowers. They need to be made in advance and dried, and we just didn't have time. So, I just made her some buttercream flowers all over her cake. She picked different ideas from a bunch of different cakes out of my books, and I did whatever she wanted. This is how it turned out. Thanks for stopping by!

Fondant!

Here are pictures from the third (last) class of the Level III Cake Decorating Course. The fourth class is always the one where we make our final cakes, so we don't learn new techniques at that one. At this one, we learned to work with fondant to cover cakes, make roses, and make lilies of the valley. I had an injured finger, so it was a little difficult for me to manipulate the fondant to make a nice rose. I'll have to practice it some more.

Fondant doesn't taste especially good, but I found a recipe on the Cake Central website where you make it from scratch with marshmallows.  I made some of the Marshmallow Fondant, and it tastes much better.  The trick is to get it the right consistency. I think it will work for covering cakes, but I'm not sure it's stiff enough for making roses. That's ok. I don't mind making the decorations with the Wilton Brand if I can cover the cake with the better tasting--and less expensive--stuff. Thanks for stopping by!

Welcome Spring! Jumbo Cookies

Shortly after making the St. Patrick's Day jumbo chocolate chip cookies, I decided they would be the perfect snack for my stamping workshop. I got these all made and ready, and then had to cancel the workshop.

I used an image from Stampin' Up! for the chick in the egg. It's fun to use the transfer technique using decorating gel with any king of image. I need to practice my writing technique. Thanks for stopping by!