Wilton Cake Decorating Course 1 Class 3

So tonight, I got to decorate my second cake. It was an adventure, to say the least.

I chose to make a Silver White Cake again, this time using some new baking techniques. 

Since I created a character cake last week, I didn't get the chance to practice icing or filling a two layer cake. My instructor recommended going ahead and filling the cake and putting the crumb coat on top.

I went ahead and put a thick layer of icing around the top of my bottom layer (as a frosting barrier). Then I filled it was raspberry filling (I'll post the recipe later). Then I went ahead and put my top layer on, which was a huge mistake. 

In retrospect, I should have made the frosting barrier larger and let it sit longer for the icing to harden. I also should have refrigerated the raspberry filling for a good half hour or longer so it would thicken up some. 

In any case, as soon as I put the top layer on, raspberry filling began bleeding out the sides of my cake. It was just a mess! The more I tried to clean it up, the worse it got! So, when I finally got to class, I was already a little frazzled. 

My instructor, though, helped me scoop some of the filling out and clean up my tray. Then I had to put on a crumb coat; it was hard to do without getting raspberry in my icing. Then she used the cake icing tip with a 16 in. featherweight bag to put a thick coat of frosting around my cake. The icing tip works really well because you can apply the icing without touching the cake (i.e., so you don't get filling everywhere).

In this class, our instructor went against the curriculum and taught us to do a gel pattern transfer of the rainbow in our course book. (Which was supposed to be the alternate cake in Lesson 2.) For this, you place a sheet of wax paper on top of the shape you want on your cake, and then you trace the shape with clear piping gel. You place the sheet gel side down on your cake, smooth the gel onto the cake (we ran a small paintbrush over the gel), and then lift off the wax paper. We filled in our rainbow with colored icing using the star tip.

Then we got to learn the first 3 flowers that are in Course 1, which are all accomplished with tip 2D. I went ahead and put three on my cake, and I was so excited that I didn't space them properly so they are just kind of... on there, lol.

All in all, though, I am pretty proud. It tastes fantastic and it doesn't look as dumb in person as I thought it did in the book. lol