Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Class: Cake Decorating Basics (Class #3)

Ta da! The Piggys have graduated from Cake Decorating Basics!!  We even have a snazzy certificate to prove it! Of course, they are hanging proudly on the fridge...


After three classes, the Piggys now know how to pipe a couple of different patterns, ice a cake, decorate it, and pipe an assortment of flowers, yay!  For our last class, we brought in cupcakes to decorate (thank goodness these came out soo much better than our cakes last week - no unfortunate craters or [pan]cakes this time)!

We prepared a couple of different colors of icing and were ready to go.  First things first, we learned how to pipe icing onto our cupcakes in a swirled motion.

Swirling 'round and 'round, just like so...
Then we jumped right into learning how to make flowers!  We prepared our flower nails (came with our Student Kits and makes piping flowers easier for us beginners).

See the Flower Nail sitting pretty on the cupcake? Piggy KK had a bunch of lovely swirled cupcakes.
(1) Pompom Flowers:
We piped a base, then used some star tips to add the center buds, and lastly went around the base to fill in the rest of the flower. Slowly but surely, it actually began looking like a flower!  Here is how our first attempt came out:

Pompom Flowers!  Not bad!

(2) Shaggy Mums:
After mastering the Pompom Flower, we were feeling more confident and ready for the next to come. This next one turned out to be super fun and easy - shaggy mums!  We got to play with the "grass" tip, so basically you're just making shaggy clumps of icing over and over again.  I think I could play with this shaggy tip all day long...

Shaggy mums! So fun to make!

(3) Roses:
Just when we were starting to feel confident, we attempted to make roses. I was most excited to learn how to make this flower - afterall you see it on all the cakes in the bakery!  However these wound up being the hardest flower of the morning, and even though our beginner roses came our slightly mutated they were still so pretty!

We piped a base, then using a petal tip, piped the middle bud and added rose petals around, row by row.  And there you have it! A rose!!

The Piggys' roses!  Perhaps ours need a bit more practice...

(4) Drop Flowers:
Believe it or not, we're not done yet! We also learned how to make Drop Flowers which are pretty easy as there were no base or delicate petals involved. (Phew, redeeming break after those roses!).  We simply piped these directly onto the cupcakes and accented them with a little dot in the middle to make a 'bud'.

Look at Piggy KK's Drop Flower bouquet!

One more thing! Flowers aren't complete without... leaves!  Some genius ancient Baking goddess invented a tip which makes leaves with just a gentle pump on icing. Amazing! We added a few leaves under all our flowers and just like that, we created our very own bouquets of cupcakes.  Check out Piggy KK's beautiful assortment:

Piggy KK's pretty pretty cupcakes
And some more by Piggy KL
Surprising, but even these beginner skills we picked up in just a few Saturdays can allow you to create beautiful creations that look even better then most of those cupcakes in the market.  I kid you not - on my way home from class, I was carrying my cupcakes in a transparent container and some passerbys mistook them store-bought cupcakes! Hah, fooled them :)

And just like that, here we are as graduates of Cake Decorating 1.  The Piggys loved the class and are eagerly waiting for Cake Decorating 2 in 2012.  In the meantime I'm sure we'll be putting our new skills to use with the holiday season coming up, so stay tuned!

Piggy KL

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