28 September 2010

Last night was the final installment of my Wilton Basics class. We learned how to put words on the cake and how to make ribbon roses. AND, we worked on our final-project-cakes. I must say, I'm pretty proud of mine. Considering I've taken merely 4 classes, I think I did pretty darn well. Here is the completed cake:

Now, I'll rewind and show you how I made it.

First of all, I had to make all these "drop flowers." They don't look how they're "supposed to" look, but I think they're awfully pretty. I only really needed 12 of each color, but I made extras for practice, and to compensate for breakage. They had to dry for 3-4 days in this humid climate we have here. As they dried, they darkened. When I made them, they were very pale and delicate in color--not any more!

I used my usual chocolate cake recipe, but swapped in Hershey's Special Dark cocoa powder. I really like the almost-black color, as well as the richer flavor. Mmmmmm. For filling, I made caramel icing by adding about 2/3 jar of Smucker's caramel ice cream topping to 1 to 1 1/2 cups "class recipe" frosting. It has an airy texture (probably from all the whipping! I added a little caramel at a time until I was pleased with the flavor) which is nice for a big thick ribbon of goodness in the middle of the cake.

Next, I iced the cake with class recipe frosting. I haven't smoothed it yet in this photo, but this is pretty much how I took it to class last night. Since you can barely see the ruler, I'll just tell you--this cake is 5 inches high! It's a TALL cake!

I had to pipe a "shell border" to place the drop flowers on. I was nervous about this because the shells I practiced in class didn't work too well. I thought it would be even harder to do them at the awkward angle required to get them on the cake. But, I was pleasantly surprised! I think it looks pretty darn good for a newbie!

I suppose I should confess that this isn't my own design. We had to choose one to mimic from the gallery in our class book. With Aa's help, I chose the most challenging design option. It uses 6 of the techniques we learned in class. It surely isn't perfect, but I'm not going to pick apart the problem areas. On the whole, I think it turned out quite well. And, I ate a half-a-slice earlier today--to die for! And, to me, that's what really counts!