Adventures in Wilton Cake Decorating Course 3 Class 4 Final

I finally finished the Wilton Course 3 class.  Next month, I start taking the fondant and gum paste class.  So I am not done yet, and rumor has it there will be two new classes coming out 🙂  I guess they really want my money 🙂

Final class went by pretty smoothly.  I didn’t random scream any cuss words 🙂

I have been preparing for this cake since Saturday/Sunday.

Here is how my tasks when down:

Saturday: made royal icing, made 26 petunias, made 20 drop swirl flowers

Sunday: made 5 pounds of fondant and 6 pounds of Italian Buttercream of which 1 pound was Mint, 1 pound was raspberry, and 4 pounds was vanilla

Monday: made a lemon cake (from Dorie Greenspan’s Perfect Party Cake), and a chocolate cake (Martha Stewart’s One Bowl Chocolate Cupcakes)

Tuesday:  made chocolate mousse (Daring Bakers’ French Yule Log Recipe) and lemon cream (Dorie’s Recipe)

Wednesday: iced and filled cakes before class

When I get to class Weds night I already felt behind.  Because the previous week I had specifically asked my instructor if we can bring our cakes with the dowels already placed in the cake and the cake covered in fondant.  Her response was no, which sucked.  I get to class and half of the people had put the fondant and the dowels in their cake already, wtf.  Yeah I wasn’t too happy about that, especially since I specifically asked 😦

I started by rolling out my fondant, of which one was the perfect consistency with little dots of gelatin that didn’t dissolve all the way and the other was a little hard.  I decided to use the dot one first and then I kneaded in some of the hard stuff so that I could cover the other layer of my cake.  My 10 inch cake covered perfectly, but that was not the case with my 6 inch.  I have no idea what happened but that fondant didn’t like me and wanted to fold up the entire time.  By the time I got it covered it was a mess.  I picked the cleanest side as the front and decided that some carefully placed flowers can make it look not so bad.

I got most of my cake finished in class except for piping on the dots and the leaves for the flowers.  When I got back to my apartment I realized the cake shifted in the box and messed up 1 set of drop strings and the entire border.  Thank god I picked a fondant cake.  I removed all the drop strings, since they looked like crap, and the entire border.  I redid all the drop string work and the border when I got home and then carefully piped all the dots onto the cake and piped in some leaves to make it look pretty.  All I can say is the cake looks pretty good.  If you are close up you can see the flaws, since this is my first ever tiered cake I will let it slide this time 🙂

When I was baking the cakes, I actually had some left over batter so I made some cupcakes and mini cakes.  I will post those later in the week with pictures and the actually recipes for the cakes in one area so that you don’t have to click back n forth for them.  I am also going to include my go to Italian Buttercream Recipe and the fondant recipe I used because it tastes A LOT better then the stuff that wilton sells and it is cheaper 🙂