Cake Decorating Class – 2nd week

For the second class, our homework was to bring in a plain unfrosted cake.  Since I have never baked a cake before in a round pan, I was pretty nervous about this and bought 2 boxes of cake mix in case I messed up.  Good thing I did, because the first cake was totally uncooked through all the way, even though I thought it passed the toothpick test.  When I went to flip the cake after it cooled, the bottom half looked like pancake batter. 

So I threw that out, made the second cake, left it in the oven for a few more minutes, and did the toothpick test like 10 times.  This one baked well, but I didn’t use enough cooking spray on the sides so it stuck a bit when I tried to flip it.  When it was cooling, I went into the living room to watch TV for a bit and the kitties decided it would be fun to jump on the counter and investigate what I made.  I came back later to find my cake with little chunks missing – ugh!  I was so frustrated at this point, I just left it and figured it would be fine once I frosted it in class. 

Our other homework was to make 2 recipes of frosting – a thin consistency that would be used to frost the entire cake and then a medium consistency that would be used to decorate the cake.  I thought my frosting was fine but unfortunately I forgot to take it inside with me when I went to work so it was left sitting in my cold car all day.  When I got to class later that evening, it didn’t warm up enough and I should have mixed it with a little more water before starting to frost.  We had to dirty ice my cake first, as there were cake crumbs mixed in with the frosting.  Then I guess I added too much water to the frosting as it was very wet and took a long time to dry.  I wasn’t able to smooth over the imperfections with a piece of parchment paper or a paper towel as it was too wet and kept pulling off the cake.  This also made it difficult to do our design with piping gel, which basically is used to transfer an image onto the cake.  Let’s just say I learned a LOT during this class :)

I was not happy with my cake whatsoever from this class as I had so many issues with the baking, frosting, and decorating.  But practice makes perfect.  At least for next time I know  I need to spray my pans better and also to bring all my frosting in with me to work for the day so it’s kept at room temp.  Here are some pictures from my horrible disaster cake, even though I’m fairly embarrassed to show these:

Uneven frosting, too wet to properly use a piping gel transfer for the image

More uneven frosting and should have wiped off the extra before doing the star border on the bottom

The design on top came out okay…I’m not a fan of using elongated shapes on cakes, though

So class #2 was definitely a learning experience in all aspects of making a cake.  Hopefully these pictures will show my improvement over the next few weeks :)  Our homework for class 3 was to bring in several different colors of icing and cupcakes to practice more decorating techniques, so I will share more of that next time.