Wilton Cake Decorating Class

Hi everyone! It's a me, Lulu! <-- a la Mario from Mario Brothers :)
Haha just thought I'd be silly there for a little bit. Moment of silliness is now over.
Anywho, I wanted to share with you my experience with the cake decorating class I took through the month of September. I have always liked the detailed work of decorating a cake. Growing up, my mom would actually be the baker (as I could not make the cake rise properly for the life of me!), but I would put the final touches with the decoration. Growing up in Brazil, cakes there are usually frosted with whipped heavy cream (chantili in Portuguese). Whipped cream is very temperature sensitive, and even a little heat from your own hands transferred onto the piping bag can melt the cream into liquid! So I remember sitting in the chilly garage during the winter to decorate the cake properly :P
During those times, I got to start enjoying the small decorative tips, and all the different shapes they can create. Knowing this, my husband gave me Wilton 2104-7778 Master Tip Set for Valentine's Day this past year, and I started experimenting with all the other tips (I had no clue on what most of the tips did!). I got a little frustrated not really understanding how to use these said tips. Around July I went to our local Hobby Lobby and saw a sign for cake decorating class. I thought: Perfect! I signed up for it, got all necessary supplies, and even had first day of class butterflies! There were 4 classes total, once a week for 4 weeks, and each class was 2 hours long. Here is a little run down on each of those classes:


First class: introduction, buttercream making demo.
We didn't really do much during this class, other than being shown how to make Wilton's buttercream frosting recipe (which btw it helped see what they mean by different consistencies! -- I might do a demo of buttercream consistencies as a separate blog sometime). Also we got tips on how to bake and level a cake. Our homework was to bring a leveled cake to decorate at the next class.


Second class:  first cake decorating!
We learned how to use the star and the round tips. You can make stars, shells, and zig-zag lines with the star tip; and balloons, lines, dots, and much more with the round tip. Here is the finalized cake of this class - it was one of my co-working dentist's son's birthday that next day, it was the perfect reason!

Third class: cupcake decorating!
To change things up a bit, our instructor told us to bring in cupcakes instead of a whole cake to decorate. I was so pumped! I went all out and instead of just making plain vanilla cupcakes, I made coconut-pecan cupcakes (recipe at a later date) and flavored the frosting recipe with almond extract (it turned out pretty good, if I may say so myself!)
We learned the drop flower, star flower, shaggy mum, little roses, and leaves! It was really neat to make so many different flowers in one class. Here are the final decorations:

Me finishing my homework :)

Fourth class: final class!
For our final class, the instructor told us to bring a baked cake and a thought-out cake decorating theme. Man, this took me a little while to decide. I wanted it to be special, but unique... I tend to overthink things sometimes (ok, a little more than sometimes...). Guess when I finally decided on what to do: on the drive to the final class!

So with fall being my favorite season, I thought that should be enough of reason for a fall-themed cake. The cake itself was a pumpkin-pecan cake, and although I would have personally preferred the recommended cream cheese icing, I had to use the Wilton's buttercream to have the consistency for decorating. Here are the pictures of that final project:

Me with my final project and my certificate of completion!

My final thoughts on this class: it was so much fun, I learned a lot and can't wait to take the other classes available (flowers, and fondant!)