Nearly two years ago, I took a cake decorating class with my mom and one of my younger sisters. I've always wanted to learn to decorate cakes and especially how to make a rose out of frosting, so when I saw a Wilton Cake Decorating class offered at my local craft store, I signed up (and convinced my mom and sister to join me). It was great fun and I learned a lot about frosting and baking cakes that I had never known. I even learned how to make a decent looking rose out of frosting (though my sister was MUCH better at it than me). 4 weeks, 4 cakes, and many dollars later, the class was finished and I contemplated taking the next course, Wilton Cake Decorating Course 2. My mom and sister didn't want to take the next course at the time, and I ended up not taking it right away. Then we moved, and life was crazy for a while.
Over the summer, the sister who took the class with me went to visit another of my sisters and they took the second course in the cake series together. On her way back home, my sister stopped at my house and happened to bring her final cake with her. It was amazing to see! Beautiful flowers, birds, and basket weave, all made of frosting and totally edible! I was hugely impressed and reminded that I did want to take that class at some point in the future.
A few months ago I was at my local craft store again (for who knows what reason - I'm really not a crafty person and for the life of me I can't remember what on earth I was doing there) and stopped by the class schedule list to see if they happened to be offering a class on making chocolates (another thing I'm very interested in learning to do). No such luck, but I did notice course 2 of the Wilton method was being offered, and that the class fee was half price if I signed up for September. So, on a whim, I signed up for the class without even checking with my husband (something I typically don't do). I purchased my class kit and went home to dig out my cake decorating box from under the pile of lightbulbs in the laundry room.
I thoroughly enjoyed the class. One of the best parts was that I only had to make a cake for the final week instead of making a cake each week as we had done in course 1. I learned to make 2 new kinds of frosting: royal icing for the flowers (they dry stiff) and color-flow icing for the birds (they also dry stiff but are shiny). I learned to make mums, victorian roses, daisies, violets, daffodils, apple blossoms, and a few more kinds of flowers that I can't remember the names of. I made edible birds, and learned to make beautiful basketweave on my cake sides. I was thrilled with my final project, in spite of the flaws. Because honestly, if you don't know what the mistakes are (and I'm not going to tell you!), the cake looks awesome! It tasted great and I would have been thrilled to eat the whole thing myself, but I decided after 4 weeks of eating all the leftover frosting (I figure I probably downed about 4-6 pounds of powdered sugar all by myself) I'd had more than my fair share of that, so I ended up giving away better than half the cake. Probably a good choice, especially since the only reason I tolerate cake is because I love frosting. :)
Kimball went a little nuts taking pictures so there are a gazillion. :)
