Wilton Cake Decorating Course 3

Course 3 of the Wilton Cake Decorating Courses deals more with fondant and tiered cakes. There wasn't much about the fondant aspect that I didn't learn on my own ahead of time. We did learn some different flower techniques and making fondant flowers.

Sarah's 30th Birthday cake

I created this cake for my sister's 30th birthday. The flavor of the cake is dark chocolate with a chocolate mousse filling and chocolate buttercream icing (of my own recipe). I shredded chocolate on top instead of curling it (not to mention, it just wouldn't curl for me). This is the first cake I'd done since starting the Wilton Cake Decorating Classes.



I also don't feel a cake is finished until it's been put in a cake box. It takes on a more professional appeal. I wonder if someday I could get some cool custom boxes made.

Jakes 24th Birthday

I didn't want this cake to be too girly, but the birthday boy didn't really give me a preference to what he wanted. He said white cake with strawberry filling. That was it. So I did a basket weave with a yellow sweet pea border. He loved it.

Wilton Cake Course 2

After the first course, where I learned how to make roses, vines, hearts, people's faces, and borders, I ventured on to course two. In course two we learned the basketweave technique, rope borders, and various types of flowers with royal icing. We also learned the color flow technique. To this day I have yet to see the color flow technique used in a bakery or on a grocery store cake. I've been looking too. Here is my graduation cake from course two. Pay no attention to the rope border, I had issues with it and still can't get it perfectly right.

Wilton Cake Decorating Course 1

I decided to make time for myself. I chose to take the Wilton Cake Decorating courses at the local Michael's store. The instructor for the first course was very good at her job and she'd been doing cakes for a long while. I learned so much that I thought I knew before, but was way wrong. This was my graduation cake from course one:

Early Cakes Continued...

I did this cake for my daughters 5th Birthday. It had to be horses and a barn on a hill. The fondant colored easily, but this was before I learned the tricks about corn starch and stickiness. You can notice the lumpy and shiny spots in the grass. I had trouble getting things smooth.

Early Cakes Continued

This cake was my second attempt at fondant. This time it was much better. Fondant is very forgiving. It stretches, pulls, forms, etc. It's like playing with playdough almost. I went out and bought some really cute fondant cutters and tried my hand at coloring the fondant. Not too bad. I stacked the shapes and thought for a second attempt, this was not too bad:

Early Cakes Cont.

So next, I decided that I would give fondant a try. I had never worked with fondant, but had watched a lot of it on TV. How hard could it be? March was Grandma's birthday so my sister and I decided that we should make her a cool cake and try out what we had thought we learned on TV. We found out that fondant tastes HORRIBLE. But moving on... This is her cake:


At this point, we had so, so much to learn.

Early Cakes

These cakes are cakes that were made before I had taken any of the wilton classes. The first one I did was a monkey cake for my daughter's 2nd birthday. I was 10 days out from abdominal surgery and it was very hard for me to stand for very long. Therefore, this cake took me 2 days to decorate. Later I learned that you can't just use a tub of any old frosting to decorate cakes. By the way, she loved this monkey cake: