Cake Decorating - The Basics

I have found my calling! Well I’m getting a little ahead of myself…but I did just start taking cake decorating lessons and I love it! I have always enjoyed baking and creating sweet treats so this class will help me make those sugary creations into something beautiful. There are 3 Wilton Cake Decorating Courses – Decorating Basics, Flowers and Cake Design and Gum Paste and Fondant. I am in the Basics class now but I hope to take all of them! Each course consists of 4 classes that gets more challenging as the weeks go on. Each class requires you to buy supplies and kits so I am happy that I finally get to build up my stash of supplies! The class consists of all different skill levels; I would consider myself a beginermediate (higher than beginner but not quite intermediate, I just invented that wordJ).

Last Tuesday was my first class and we learned the basics of icing a cake, ways to smooth the icing, tips on how to pipe a gel pattern transfer and how to create simple designs using the #18 star tip. The star tip can be used to create many designs and can also be used to frost a cupcake (depending on the size tip you use). We decorated cookies with different designs – and of course I had to create an Auburn cookie!

Practice!

My decorated cookies!

Tonight was my second cake decorating basics class. This class was definitely more challenging than my first class because we actually got to decorate a cake tonight and free hand the designs. We even got to use different colors on our cakes which you can imagine got very messy.  We also learned how to hold the icing bag, create curving lines, tight zigzags and dimensional dots, and how to color our icing. Every class has us practice on a board before decorating the actual food item, which is good in case we mess up – which is not uncommonJ The cupcake drawing was one of the designs we practiced tonight using a template, but it became more difficult when we had to free hand it. Although the cupcake is not completely centered in the middle of the cake and I got a little carried away with the polka-dots (my mother always says less is more), I am still very proud of my first decorated cake!

Practicing curving lines and tight zigzags

Dimensional Decorating 

TA-DA!