Who's the Cake Boss Now?

Early in January, my daughter and I were talking back and forth on our phones.  She told me that she was planning to take a cake decorating course.  I said "Oh fun!" and her next message changed the course of my winter evenings.  "Do you want to take it with me?"

I thought about it for a couple of minutes and then spontaneously said yes.

It has been a blast.  I have learned a lot.   This particular lesson was how to transfer a shape onto the cake and decorate in the middle of it.  It involves parchment and tracing a shape with gel.  If you look close you will see that I was trying to make a cupcake shape on the cake.  You don't see it?  Don't worry.  It's not there.  I started trying to freehand it and realized that it looked nothing like the transfer would have if I had actually used the gel to trace the cupcake shape.  So I smoothed it all over and practiced using the star tip instead.  Goodbye cupcake.

Hello avante guard sundial.  

Or 

something.  

My daughter on the other hand...
Freehanded this fish.  Guess all those high school art classes paid off

Every week, we were taught different techniques and given time to try them out.  We had practice boards, and then got a chance to put them on a real cake or cupcakes.

In the lesson you see above, we learned to make daisies  [bottom left] (I think they were daisies) and shaggy mums [top left] (mine ended up looking like a leftover spaghetti dinner) and roses [pink icing].

My daughter took this to the next level and did some free lance work:

We had so much fun for the first round, we decided to do Round Two.  Four more weeks of fun.  In these classes, we learned about fondant flowers, and Royal Icing roses.  We learned about using Gum Paste - and not eating it even though it is Food Safe.

We had to have our decorations done for the last class because they wouldn't have time to dry.  As a grande finale, we learned the basket weave technique (and how much icing that would take ----- can you say "How to Spike Your Blood Sugar"?)

 and then we had a bit of time to finish decorating our cakes.

Personally, I think my cake looks like it has icing measles, but I took the time to try out a few techniques that I had forgotten from the last class, and the edging was the scroll  we learned, just before the basket weave.

I don't think that I will ever have to audition for "Cake Boss".  But I sure had fun.  Thanks to my daughter for asking me to join this 'new and interesting experience'.  I loved it.  But most of all, I loved spending time together.