Cake Decorating Success!

Let's just say that we were beyond excited for Wednesday, April 11th. Not only was it the opening game of the Stanley Cup playoffs for our Vancouver Canucks (we won't mention the result...), but we were actually going to decorate a cake in our cake decorating class!! Whoo hoo!

The class was surely a highlight and we came out of there on a big 'high'! Getting to our end result (which we were SUPER happy with) was not all fun and games. We had some serious cake baking issues, which doesn't happen very often! One of our two 9 inch cakes loved the pan so much that it stuck to it...leaving us with a chunk missing! Not sure what to do, we brought both to class to see if we could perform some magic! And magic did we perform!

SIDE NOTE: Our awesome instructor Michelle warned us that certain store bought mixes are better than others. Let's just say the store we went to only sold the brand she advised against - but it was on sale and convenient, so we thought, 'what could go wrong'? Well, did we ever find out! So from now on, we will err on the side of caution and either make one from scratch or use the preferred brand....

Anyways, back to the good stuff. After consulting with Michelle, we decided that our best option in order to avoid a 'cake'tastrophe was to layer the two 9 inch cakes on top of one another, with a filling of buttercream icing. The cakes themselves would have been too small to torte, which was supposed to be the lesson, but oh well - we managed! In the end, we made one larger cake instead of two, but it was actually quite fun working on it together!

 

The first step involved setting the icing on the cake, which was VERY difficult due to our crumby, crumby cake (not as in bad tasting, but as in actual crumb pieces!). This was all a direct result of our poor choice in brand name cake mixes, so we have an excuse this time! We dyed our icing a deep purple (the pictures don't do the colour justice) and used our spatula to CAREFULLY slab/spread/smooth it around. This is clearly an area we will spend time working on, as the 'smoothness' of our set icing was far from perfect. But it was our first try, right? We can only get better!

The icing is all set - as good as it's going to get!

Making the cupcake design was the most fun. We lucked out with free-handing the cupcake image - it worked great! Just kidding. We used piping gel to trace and transfer the image onto the cake and then outlined and iced it with pink and white icing. We must say, we were extremely pleased with the results! We finished off the decorating with some round pink dots along the sides and some white elongated shapes along the bottom. Using colour is so much fun and definitely makes things 'pop'.

Our pink icing!

Finishing touches on the cupcake!

So there you have it - our finished cake! After only two classes, we are quite surprised at the results! You know it started badly when at the end of class, our instructor said, 'Good save, girls!'. haha. We think we may have the cake decorating bug - we want to keep practicing and experimenting! Next week - cupcakes! Can't wait!

Our first cake!!!!!