Wilton Fondant and Gum Paste Final Cake

I cannot contain my excitement any longer, must post this before I go to bed
This is my final cake for my Wilton cake deco class series. The baby booties were made using fondant & gum paste mix and I found a template online. This was not taught in class. I will share the instructions here  tomorrow. The green flowers were “modified” daisies, and they were meant to be mums. The cake is made from scratch this time, and it’s called Hummingbird cake.

This cake will be so darn cute for a baby shower or “full moon”!

Will also post full review of the Wilton classes on my blog in near future (this Saturday)

Wilton Course 3: Tiered Cake – Brush Embroidery

 

This is the cake that I made tonight. I was supposed to make the flowers out of royal icing or buttercream but I was gone last weekend so the flowers will not be dry enough for cake assembly. The objective of the class was to learn how to tier the cake, so I did some research online for some designs.

Basically, I covered the cakes with fondant and the transferred the rose pattern onto the cake using piping gel. Then I piped buttercream on the gel and used a wet brush to paint the edges in. This is called brush embroidery technique. We learned this in our first class for Course 3. I’ve read that you should use royal icing instead, but my teacher taught us using buttercream. The only difference is that royal icing dries hard.

I used silk flowers between the tiers and used a ribbon to cover the imperfection of the fondant edge. I’m still having trouble getting the fondant to lay right at the edges. The ribbons were “glued” onto the cake by piping a line or a few dots of buttercream onto the cake. We’ll get to make beautiful flowers like these next week in the Fondant & Gum Paste class…

I love this cake so much, and the pink roses are the same that I’ve used at my wedding. I wish that this was my wedding cake instead

Wilton Course 3: Fondant Cake and Rose

I had been looking forward to this class for a long time. I have heard a lot about working with fondant, and how it tastes like. It was a jam-packed class, with so much to learn in 2 hours. I’ve made the marble cake on Monday which was lightly iced and I had decided that the fondant should be in “Tiffany” blue. The colour came out nicely, and then we had to make the bow. I was going to just plain white with the whole “Tiffany” theme but decided to go with canary yellow instead. So here’s my first fondant cake, whereby the “Tiffany” blue looks more like robin’s egg’s blue. I love it so much. As for the bead buttercream border, that didn’t go too well. I had invisioned them to be perfectly oval to be consistent with the whole Easter theme but obviously my skills are not quite there yet.
We also learned to make our first fondant rose, which I’m extremely proud off. I have a hard time making my roses with buttercream and royal icing, so this turned out to be much better!

Marble Cupcake with Chocolate & Vanilla Buttercream

I was making a cake for tomorrow’s Wilton cake decorating class and I was trying to get creative with a box of yellow cake mix. I’ve used different fillings before, so I thought I’d try to make marble cake instead. I was looking for an easy way to make it without using too much extra ingredients, and one of the recipe I found simply required me to mix melted unsweetened chocolate with 1/3 of the yellow cake batter. Simple enough, I thought, except that when I poured it into the 8X8 pan, the batter overflowed! So I quickly lined a muffin pan with paper cups and poured the remaining batter in to make cupcakes.

They turned out quite good, but I should probably have added more sugar and melted butter or sour cream so that they chocolate parts are more moist. For the cake itself, I halved the cake when it was done and cooled, and spread leftover chocolate buttercream as filling and then covered with a light layer of vanilla buttercream icing so that it is ready to be covered in fondant tomorrow in class. I’m excited!

As for the cupcakes, I filled a piping bag with both vanilla and chocolate buttercream and piped a swirl on top. The swirls look like soft-serve ice cream! Andy was happy to see them ready for his belly

Wilton Class II Graduation Cake

Class 2 Wilton Cake Decorating class ended tonight. This is my “graduation” cake.

Flowers are made out of royal icing in the past few weeks, and the birds are made with “color flow”. Vines and leaves are made from buttercream. Basketweave, shell border, rope borders and frosting are chocolate flavoured buttercream icing with chocolate brown food colouring added to it to get to the right colour.

In this course, we learned how to make pansies, violets, primroses, Victorian roses, rose buds, daisies, mums, apple blossoms, and daffodils over 3 classes (3 weeks, 1 class a week). Royal icing and color flow creations harden really well and can be made well ahead of time.

I think I got a little too crazy with the flowers and vines, hence it’s more like an untamed spring jungle cake  (I’ve got spring fever due to some crazy frigid weather in Michigan right now). Plus, I didn’t want to arrange the flowers like in the course book, but I rather have them creep up from the bottom instead.

Class 3 starts next week and we’ll be making tiered wedding cakes!

More pics… (I’m really proud of this cake, as you can tell )

A Free Kitchenaid Stand Mixer!

 

Yeap, you heard it right! And if you bake, you’ll know that I’m the luckiest person on Earth to have my hands on this baby for nothing at all. Many thanks to my co-worker Steph who dug this out of her garage in the middle of the winter just for me. Apparently her father-in-law had acquired the mixer at a estate sale for only $3!! This piece of machine is at least a few hundred bucks and built like a tank! And it came with the wire whisk, dough hook and beaters, all in perfect condition.

I was told that not only that this is a nicely made solid piece of machinery that is probably a few decades old, but this specific model is one of the higher end ones in the market for household use. This is a bowl-lift model, versus the tilt-head model. It was a little dusty, but nothing a little elbow grease and baking soda couldn’t handle and VOILA! It’s shining like new again.

One more thing that I love about this mixer is that you can tell that it’s retro, and that’s so cool! One tell-tale sign is the “Hobart” logo on the side, and the types of screws used (I was told). Hobart no longer makes this mixer for Kitchenaid today. A research online about Hobart Kitchenaid vintage mixers derived this information:

“The Hobart is designed for use in restaurant and other commercial kitchen heavy duty applications. It is also frequently used in laboratories to mix things such as cement samples and other tough mixing jobs. Such a mixer in a household setting should last several generations of use. It will not stall or stop on heavy bread or pizza doughs…The vintage Hobart Kitchenaid home mixers were engineered and produced to similiar standards as their Commercial line of mixers. That is why they are so sought after and praised on the internet. “

Source: http://www.recipezaar.com/bb/viewtopic.zsp?t=239696 (post by Hobartgirl)

I’ve already used this baby to whip up my first batch of Royal Icing for my Wilton Cake Deco Class Course 2, and it was such a relieve that I didn’t have to use my hand mixer for that job. Royal icing is a lot stiffer and takes about 7-10 minutes to make. I can’t wait to make many more things in the kitchen. Also, all the modern attachements for the mixer will still fit on this retro piece of machinery, e.g. pasta maker, meat grinder, etc. I think my kitchen is pretty equipped now, with the 12-cup Kitchenaid food processor and this stand mixer, I’m set for life (I hope!)