Basket Case...I mean Cake

On Tuesday, I finished Wilton Course II. The finale cake features a basket weave design and is overflowing with a lush bouquet of royal icing flowers.


The cake is 1-2-3-4 cake (with lemon extract instead of almond) featured on the back of the Swan's Down Cake Flour box, with Wilton's lemon filling, and lemon cream cheese frosting. I was getting tired of the sticky sweet Class Buttercream, so decided to try this recipe for Crusting Cream Cheese Frosting. Perfect!


The course II student kit comes with two oval pans for baking the final cake. The pans are quite small, which meant.....cupcakes!

The Artist couldn't wait to be my guinea pig and cupcake hand model. He definitely enjoyed the cake...I think he's been eating it for breakfast.

Wilton Course I Finale Cake

Tonight was the final session of the Wilton Course I. From my practice roses, I thought the cake was going to look homemade. But, that's what I get for trying to read ahead and make them without the teacher demonstrating. (That IS what I paid for, right?) So, after watching the demonstration, I saw exactly what I'd been doing wrong, and voila! Wonderful buttercream roses!

Here is the final cake:

Not that we were eating grocery store cakes before, but definitely not from this point on! I'm not ready to make wedding cakes or anything, but I think I can outdo the folks at the local grocery store.

Course 2 starts next week, and I'm definitely excited. I'm not sold on that finale cake design with the basket and the birds and what not, but excited none the less. See ya next week.

Chocolate Cake Copy Cats

So, last week, I made a chocolate cake to take to a get together with some school friends. It was chocolate cake (Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate Cake) with chocolate buttercream frosting. I used the Wilton recipe for chocolate buttercream; one, because I had not yet tried that recipe, and two, I wanted a consistency that would let me practice my new cake decorating skills. All was well until I tasted a dab of the frosting....

Not what I was expecting. For whatever reason, it didn't taste right. It didn't taste bad, but something was off. It tasted and even smelled...sweeter? The only thing I could think of was that I had run out of regular vanilla in the cake batter and had had to use the Wilton clear vanilla in the frosting. Well, since it was still pretty good, I went ahead and frosted the cake with it using a star tip.

At the party, a couple of people commented on the "something extra" in the frosting, and one asked me if I had used almond extract. And then it hit me! When I grabbed the bottle of clear vanilla, I didn't read the label to make sure that it was vanilla. It actually was almond extract. The two bottles are identical except for a colored stripe. Mea culpa.

So, the cake was an interesting flavor, but no one seemed to mind. Another interesting tidbit is that another friend at the party who is from Canada, wondered where I'd gotten the cake, as it looked exactly like a cake sold only in her country. She said the cakes were nearly identical, right down to the disposable tin foil pan. My mistake cake even tastes identical to the Canadian cake! How funny is that?

My cake:

The Canadian cake, "McCain's Deep and Delicious":
http://www.mccain.ca/framework/builder.aspx?page=SubCategory&lang=en&partition=1&category=3&category1=5028&selected=5028&marker=CMF_LEVEL_TWO_MARKER:CategorySee

My First Cake

Well,...not first cake, exactly. But it is the first cake I made with skills from my Wilton Cake Decorating Course I. I think it turned out pretty good! I'm already planning cakes for my birthday in a few weeks, and my husband's birthday in September. Stay tuned...