My name is Lori. I'm from the 'Burgh, born and raised. That's Pittsburgh, PA, for those of you not from round here n'at. I bake cakes. I have since I was a girl. But I haven't always decorated them. Relatively recently in life I have discovered a new talent and adoration for doing so! Much of that came from four courses that I took over a period of four months. These consisted of one 2 hour class each week for which I was to bring everything but the kitchen sink (including the already baked cakes!) to a little room in the back of a craft store.
I wanted to create this blog to show my progression in and since those classes. This post will show the cakes that I made during those classes. Then as I make more and hopefully get better and better, I will post the cakes and potentially the process of making them....so all's I'm sayin is, more to come!
Course Number One - March 2010
We started off learning how to work with buttercream. These are drop flowers. They are super simple.
Not the best example, but hey, it was my first cake.
We were learning to use the star tip and the round tip that is used for lettering, outlines, etc. I had a cute cookie cutter in that shape; someone in my class actually suggested the phrase "shot through the heart." Now every time I see this cake, Bon Jovi begins belting it out in my head.
Next we learned to make roses out of buttercream. This was one of the parts that I was most looking forward to trying. It is something that needs to be practiced, for sure, it's not as easy as some people can make it look! My beautiful niece Cathleen was coming to the 'Burgh for the first time and I had a cake to make for class, so I thought that this would be cute.
But the cuteness of my niece obviously far outshines the cuteness of the cake. Oh well, what can you do?
Course Number Two - April 2010
On to more complicated endeavors! I was pleased to be informed that we would be making a relatively wide range of flowers over the next two courses, and out of different mediums as well. The flowers on the cake below are all made with buttercream, but the following cake (with the petunias) has royal icing flowers. If you use enough meringue powder, butttercream frosting will actually form a crust that allows you to pick up the flowers and arrange them once they have sat a spell. The flat images (the butterfly, the big flower on the side, and the words on the cake below) are made with color flow icing. Once dried, it is crunchy and fragile, but makes awesome looking logos and 2-D images.
On the top of this cake you can see roses, primroses, crysanthemums, violets, apple blossoms, a daisy, and the words made of color flow icing. This was my first time working with the color flow, and trial and error taught me much for the next time I work with it. This came out as well as I could have hoped though!
The butterfly is also made with color flow. The texture on the side is called basket weave, and is all about spacing. As long as you get your spacing right, then it is not really as complicated as it looks. I really had fun doing it. These three flowers are a yellow mum, a pink primrose, and a blue/purple pansy. The pansy is my favorite.
This flower is also color flow, and those are a daisy, a pansy, and a rose hanging right over top of it. You can see that I had already gotten somewhat better at the roses at this point!
Course Number Three - May 2010
For the next class, we finally got to working with fondant, which I was really excited about. We also learned a bunch of new flowers that
were made with royal icing. Royal icing dries very hard, allowing larger and deeper flowers to maintain their shape.
It usually ends up being mainly decorative, but children often like to try to eat it.
These are petunias fanning away from a central rose. The petunias are made of royal icing. The rose is made of a mix of fondant and gum paste. I always equate fondant to edible clay. It does many of the same things as clay. The gum paste is really just fondant that dries hard. I mix the two together so that the rose will dry relatively hard, but won't dry out so quickly that I don't have time to form it.
The cake itself is covered in fondant and then the green leaf and vine detailing and the purple shell border are buttercream frosting.
There was also a small fondant/gum paste rose and royal icing petunia on the side.
Course Number Four - June 2010
And the grand finale, fondant flowers, which is the part I ended up loving the most even though I probably had the most trepidation about it initially. When using fondant/gum paste to form flowers as opposed to buttercream, you have much more control. You can shape and form whereas with buttercream, you pretty much have to get it right when it is coming out of your piping bag. It is also less fragile, though it is still quite easily broken. Care has to be taken with flowers made of pretty much any sugar medium; one exception I know of is royal icing flowers once they are fully dried.
This cake is all decorated with fondant or fondant/gum paste mixtures. The flowers are roses and carnations and they are highlighted with petal dust on the edges of the petals. The border is tiny petunias and balls rolled in edible shimmer dust.
Sorry the pictures are kind crappy, they were taken on my cell phone, I forgot my camera that day. By the time I got home, the border shown in the first pic had gone all over the place. That taught me a lesson in how not to secure little fondant balls and petunias as a border!
The leaves are also made of fondant.
This next cake was the final cake of all of the courses. I was sad that the classes were going to be over, but was very pleased with this cake's turnout.
This cake is covered with buttercream frosting and is decorated with a red fondant border and fondant/gum paste roses.
This is definitely my favorite cake from the class, and probably my best.
Well, those are my cakes!! Hope you have enjoyed getting a photo tour of my little journey even a sliver as much as I enjoyed all the bakin', n' decoratin', n'at. Soon I'll be posting the other cakes that I have done since that class (as it is August 2011 and the last class was June 2010). There aren't as many as I wish there were, but I put my all into each one!
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