Night Four of Cake Decorating

Last Thursday I had my last cake decorating class. For our final class we had to bring in an already made and perfectly frosted cake. Fun! More practice time! Since I had left over strawberries I decided to make my Strawberry Champagne cake again, and this time I would perfect it. I made it for Easter, and it did not go as well as planned. This time I would make a well so the strawberry juice would not leak out of my cake and make a hot mess. This will work, and I'll have a perfect cake! I got to town making my cake and it turned out perfectly (of course). Once it cooled down I used the left over strawberry buttercream frosting I had to use between the layers. Then I made my very deep well, and added cut strawberries. No juice is getting out this time!

For this class we are supposed to make the criscocream frosting....I ended up making my usual buttercream frosting because I really wanted to eat the cake! I put my top layer on top of the bottom layer and went about my business frosting my cake. I used the 16 inch featherweight piping bag and the appropriate tip for frosting the edges of the cake. I should have known I might run into some issues when the frosting didn't stick to the cake. This same thing happened to me and the other students in the class, so I didn't think long about it, and promptly dismissed the idea. I did notice a problem though when I kept getting a bulge around my cake's middle even after I had smoothed everything out. I probably fixed it up a good four times.....and then the streams appeared. NO! Crap. After trying to patch up the cake with little success I opted on removing the strawberries. Yes. This means that I scraped out the oozing middle as far in as I could get (mixing my pink middle frosting with my cream outer frosting). I then had to pry the two glued layers apart. This was an interesting task. I scraped the melting strawberries off the gooey middle, and scraped off a lot of the pink frosting just to be sure to get most of the juices out. Then I smushed the two layers back together, and attempted to fix my white frosting. Luckily there was just enough. Unfortunately the strawberries did quite a bit of damage as I found out when I took the cake out of the box when I got to class. I assume the cake should not look like this:

This is my final product -- trying to make something  out of it.

Lesson learned: never ever ever. Never! EVER EVER! use fresh fruit in between layers of cakes if you do not want an avalanche of frosting. Instead: make a sauce out of whatever fresh fruit you want to use! This is thick, stays put in its' well, and does not create streams! This is the route to go. I assure you. The instructor did tell me that my frosting was perfectly executed...it was just those strawberries.

Anyway, on our last night we learned how to make roses! This seemed an ominous task especially when you see what the tip to actually make the rose looks like. How in the world?! But she showed us, we were scared to try, and then we all had a pleasant surprise when we attempted our own rose. The final products looked like roses! Might sound silly, but I was expecting it to look like some ugly thing, but it wasn't! It was so pretty.

For our final hour or so we were to replicate one of the cake designs from our Wilton plan book. I had thought that I didn't want to make one with roses because the roses in the book are so awful looking, but now that I had pretty, delicate pink roses I wanted to cover the entire surface in them! I picked a cake and put my roses on, then made some leaves to fill in the spaces (which look completely natural). I could not have been more proud of myself. The (top, anyway) looked so impressive. Everyone was inspecting each others' cake designs and oooing and ahhhing at how wonderful they looked. It turned out to be the perfect last night.

These roses were so much fun to make!

The top of my cake is so pretty!

Hopefully sometime in the near future I'll take the next step and take the class on working with more flowers and cake design. We'll see, and I'll keep you posted. :)