As I beginning to type this, I'm watching Hell's Kitchen. I can't help but wonder what it would be like if Gordon Ramsay was running a bakery. Not to mention, what he would say if he were a guest in my home for a meal. I wonder if he would be flattering or if he would be honest and treat me like the other chefs that cook for him.
Anyway, back to the real purpose of this blog. I started the second course of cake decorating by Wilton. Initially this was called Course II. I'm not entirely sure why they revamped their entire course outline. But they are no longer calling it Course II. It is now Flowers and Cake Design. The first thing that I experienced is that everything that you have to purchase for this class is infinitely more expensive that then first course. However, you are working with fondant and gum paste. So that explains a lot.
We started right out of the gate with working with fondant. I had thought of my sister at the beginning, so I chose to work with the purple fondant. The consistency reminds me a lot of play-doh. (Yeah, that is the nanny coming out in me. One of these days it would be fun to have some fondant out with the kiddos and see what they make out of it.) The one thing that I absolutely did not like about it is that you have to cover your hands in shortening before you work with it. It felt totally gross.....but I will say that the following day, my hands were super soft!
One of the main things that I realized during this class was how long it takes to do anything with fondant. I always wondered why it was so expensive to get a cake with all of the detail work done in fondant. Now I know. I am used to coming home from class with a full, 8" round cake to show for it. This class on the other hand....yeah....I came home with 2 flowers. Yep, that's right, 2. I will say though, that they turned out wonderfully! My first flower was the button flower. This was SUPER easy. However, it was done in pretty much 3 different steps.
My next flower was the pansy. It was so hard! I can't even imagine how long it would take to make a cake covered in them. They were so finicky. And tempermental. But it turned out beautiful. The only thing that I didn't do was use some yellow fondant for the center. It just didn't seem logical to open a whole pack of fondant just to make one little flower. So I cheated just a little.
The second class was great. I felt like we did a lot more this time. We were supposed to be working with Royal Icing, however we decided to work with buttercream instead. The theory is that if you can create a flower with buttercream you can do it with royal icing later. This week we worked on the apple blossom and the primrose. (Not only is this class wonderful for cake decorating, but you really learn a lot about flowers.) The apple blossom was super tiny. But really cute. It made me think of a little girl's birthday cake.
The primrose, is by far one of my favorites! It was super cute and would look wonderful on top of some cupcakes. They were fairly easy once I realized the bag and tip placement. Oh and one other thing, when you sprinkle them with edible glitter....they are perfect!
Last but not least, we worked on the rosebud. I did great on my first try! The second however wasn't so great. lol You can see in the picture below that I didn't like it. So I didn't even try to finish it!
Overall, I'm still loving my classes. I'm not sure what I will do when they are over. I guess I will have to make a decision on moving further with the culinary thing. I will be posting a few other things that don't have to do with class...but they were still a learning experience for me.
Happy caking!
No comments:
Post a Comment