Practice Makes Perfect...If You Have a Plan

Practice makes perfect. Or so I've been told. At any rate, I was itching to make a pretty cake with my new frosting skills. But, we really didn't need the cake around the house. I toyed with buying a cake dummy, but thought that would be a waste of frosting. I toyed with making cupcakes, but that would leave 18 indidual little cakes to be devoured.

.....So, I compromised by baking the cake in a loaf pan, and cutting it in half to make two separate mini cakes. Two canvases for the effort of one! Beyond that, I didn't have a decorating plan...and, it showed in my finished pieces.

The first cake, with the polka dot ribbon was supposed to be decorated with pink dots. However, I will definitely need some sort of stencil or marking guide to do this in the future. Since the dots weren't working, I switched to a pink ribbon type swirl, accented with dots.

Then, I wanted to practice my roses, but the rest of my tiny cake was a blank canvas. It would have made a cute individual birthday cake. But, alas, no birthdays, though "LOVE" is always in the air.

Lessons learned from this experiment:

1) Have a plan. Wandering all willy-nilly with the frosting is not going to work.

2) Frosting square cakes neatly is hard. (Will be looking for a YouTube video on the topic)

3) Make sure you have an abundance of frosting (see lesson 1).

4) Certain frosting consistencies are recommended for certain applications for a reason.

5) Using milk instead of water in a cake mix improves the cake mix taste and texture. Not as good as homemade, but better than straight box mix.