3 posts tagged “cake class”
I should have known this week would be a disaster from the word go.
I put my cake together Tuesday night and it was a little warm in the house, so I stuck it in the freezer and promptly forgot about it. I got it out Wednesday and let it sit on the dining table. A little while later I came back and it was sweating profusely. I touched the cake and some of the frosting came off on my finger and it felt all slimy. Ew! There was no way I was taking that in to cake class. So, I made another cake. I took time off work after lunch and put the cake together while I made the rest of the frosting for the next class. I got the medium frosting for the sweet peas and bows done, then I started on the stiff frosting for the roses. We needed one cup of shortening. How much did I have? Half a cup. I can not believe I've used an entire 6 pound tub of crisco in a month. Ugh. I called D and she agreed to bring more crisco to the house when she came.
After work we went home and I realized I couldn't frost my cake until D got there because I had given her my big froster tip and my spatula/knife thing to wash in her dishwasher. Crap! D was late getting to my house, too, so there was a lot of last minute running around. I finished mixing the frosting while D garotted my cake layers, put a layer of frosting in the middle and put the second one on top. Then she packed the stiff frosting while I frosted my cake, because she still can't get frosting to stick to the sides of hers. This is where fun thing number two kicked in- I ran out of frosting. My poor cake. It was sparsely covered in spots, covered with crumbs and looked like one hot mess. AND we were running late, so we threw everything into the car and off we went.
When we got there, the teacher looked at my cake and raised an eyebrow. I told her my sad sweaty cake story and she said, "You know, if you'd just left it, it would have been fine. It's just condensation. It would have dried in time for class." GAH!!! So class started and she showed us how to make sweet peas and bows. I filled up my frosting bag and my frosting was way too stiff. Crap. I emptied out the frosting bag, put some water in the tub, stirred it up and tried again. I think I made the frosting a bit too runny, but she said it shouldn't work too badly for making roses. Trustingly I filled up the pastry bag. She had us all get out nickels and showed us how to make the beehive shaped frosting base of the rose, then had us make about 15 of them on the wax paper squares we had to bring. Okay, done and donerer. I looked over at D's frosting globs and started laughing. See, we had to bring frosting colored for the bow and sweet peas and D had covered her cake in Tiffany blue frosting. We decided that what goes great with Tiffany blue? Chocolate brown! Except we didn't put enough coloring into the frosting and it was more the color of peanut butter. So, D's frosting beehives looked like tiny mounds of poop. We laughed about that until we noticed the girl across from us. She had neon day-glo pink frosting and her piles of frosting were rather tall and had kind of a pointy top that was wider than the base. It looked like she had a tiny army of bright pink penises. We started snickering. Her mom looked up, saw us looking and said, "You guys! She's only 13!" She said it while she was laughing, so we figured we weren't in too much trouble.
Then it was time to put petals on the rose, and here's where it really came off the rails. She had us put a rosebud type swirl around the top of all of our frosting mounds. We were supposed to really press into the top of the rose to get it to stick. I did, and my mound went splat. I picked up another mound and it puddled too. Yeah. That frosting she said would be good for roses was way too mushy. So I started over. I dumped all the frosting off my wax paper squares and refilled my bag with the stiff frosting for roses. Since I'd made that frosting a little stiffer than the sweet pea frosting, I softened it with a bit of water and also, once I got the bag filled, worked it with my hands to soften it up. Then I made frosting beehives, marveling at the difference the stiffer frosting made. Of course, this meant I was waaaaay behind when it came time to put the petals on. In fact, I'd just filled the bag when she started putting petals on so I half watched, half made beehives. Eventually I caught up and was ready to put my petals on. My first rose looked like someone had kind of smooshed the petals up. It didn't unfold nicely, it was all straight up in the air. To make matters worse, I have no idea if it was the frosting or my tip or what, but for some reason frosting didn't want to come out of the top of the tip as evenly as it did out of the bottom, so I had a really ragged edge to the top of the petals. I set the rose down and tried the next one. D went to take hers off the rose nail and dropped it in her lap. The teacher said that she hadn't wanted to say anything, but every time she's taught the class, someone always drops a rose. Shortly thereafter, I finished my second rose and promptly dropped it. Into my purse. Did I mention my purse looks like this? That pretty green one? Had a pink rose inside it. Yeah. After our rose dropping fiasco, D and I gave up. D put some random designs on her cake and I watched everyone else put roses on their cake and we waited out the end of class.
People in our class had some really pretty cakes. The other Me in class's cake looked really nice and D and I expressed our jealousy. We mentioned she'd done such nice cakes and we wished ours had turned out that nicely. That's when she told us this was her second time in the class. No wonder! At the end of class, the teacher handed out certificates of completion. Mine, appropriately, got a frosting blob on it. D and I talked about it and decided we were a bit burnt out on cake class and maybe we'd wait a while to take the next one. This is good, because I was getting tired of the late Tuesday night frosting and Wii parties and making the metric ton of frosting every week.
The Husband called towards the end of cake class and wondered if we'd be in the mood for food. I told him that after the class we'd just had, D and I needed Olive Garden. See, there's one cure for tough times and that is melty cheese and alcohol. Usually our go to place for that is our favorite Mexican place, where they make queso that's like liquid crack, but for frustration this extreme, we needed Olive Garden. More specifically, we needed red wine, fonduta and a tasty chocolate dessert. That bad. We talked about it at the restaurant and we both knew that making roses wasn't going to be easy, but it seemed like this class had been extra frustrating. Grrr.
When I got home I decorated my cake. No roses. A shell border, lots of sweet peas and a bow. It looked like this.
First off, hello everyone who's joining us because I made the This Is Good! Imagine my surprise at that one! Very cool! Hopefully I'll get to reply to everyone's comments soon. And now, the continuation of Hell's Kitchen. Okay, not really, but here's what happened the third week of cake class.
As mentioned before, D and I were a bit apprehensive about making clowns. First off, that's a LOT of frosting. Who in their right mind feeds a kid that much frosting? Second, clowns are creepy. While we were discussing the clown class, D kept bringing up "famous" clowns from history- Stephen King's It, John Wayne Gacy, Ronald McDonald, Shakes the Clown- and saying there was no way she was going to make a clown. I was a little concerned because I was taking the cake in to work and the day after cake class we were having a reception for our new coworker, who is getting married on Saturday. What better way to say "Yay! You're getting married!" than a cake with freaky freaky clowns on it? This was not looking good.
D came over to my house Tuesday night with her cakes- unbroken this time, she'd made them Monday night and bought the huge storage bags to carry them in- and we had dinner. No drinking this time. Well, okay, I had a glass of wine while I made frosting, but that was it. We looked at the class requirements while eating dinner and discovered that all we needed to make was one batch of thin frosting to cover a cake. How did we get that lucky? Well, this might squick some of you out, but our cake class teacher told us that if you make buttercream frosting with water, it'll last in the fridge a long time. By long time, we're talking probably the month's worth of classes. So last week after we frosted our cakes, we combined the leftovers and discovered we had just about the required amount to frost a cake. Rock star! We also needed some medium consistency frosting, which we again had from last week, and we'd need a little bit of thin, which we skimmed from the leftover frosting after D frosted her cake with the fresh stuff. Good deal. Cake frosting went well this time around, although I'm not sure what D is doing wrong. Her cake had bald patches again. Actually, I think I have an idea of what D is doing wrong. The teacher told us that when we frost, we should cover the top of the cake with frosting, then the sides of the bottom layer, then the sides of the top layer. Then you take the frosting knife and hold it against the side of the cake and slowly spin it on the turntable, periodically stopping to wipe the frosting off your knife. Once that's done, hold the knife on the cake and again turn the turntable, smoothing out the top. This is what I do. I'm not sure what D does, I think it's a random variation on this, but when she gets done it looks like she's just slapped frosting on the cake and tried to smooth it out. There were still spots where you could see cake through the frosting. I don't know what to tell her.
Anyway, we showed up to cake class Wednesday night and learned that it wasn't going to be all scary clowns, we were also going to learn a couple flowers and some leaves as well. We learned shell borders and big stars, and how to twist your wrist while making big stars to give you pretty flowers. I wasn't happy with my shells. In the picture, they show you these shells with a nice tapering point at the end. Mine looked like their back ends exploded. The teacher said they looked good, though, and pointed out that if I was making a border those ends would get covered up anyway. After those, we put on the dot tips and made big dots- for faces- and small dots. I totally would have made a bunch of grapes, but we couldn't get the tub of purple coloring open. Seriously. No one could get the tub of purple coloring open. This could possibly have been because D and I both tried after we'd been practicing frosting techniques, so we had frosting hands, and we probably greased it up good for everyone with clean hands. Oh well. Cake covered in grapes, I will make you, mark my words. We also learned how to take the big dot and turn it into a heart, although most of our hearts looked a little odd and our teacher said it actually worked a little better to turn the hearts into shamrocks. D pointed out that her hearts looked more like women with big thighs crossing their legs. Again I have to ask, how the hell do you get the points at the ends of these things? I swear, the people taking pictures for the decorating books get in there and fix the hell out of those things so they're all perfect, because there's no way one person is that perfect. We also strapped on the leaf tip and did leaves, and the teacher announced I had the touch for leaves. It's still really weird to her her say "Lorelai has the leaf touch, those look great!" and realize oh yeah, that's me!
After we'd done that, the teacher had us gather around her so she could show us how to make clowns. I have to say, it wasn't as bad as we'd been expecting. The worst part really is their creepy heads on spikes. You use the big star tip to make a stack of frosting for the body, then you squirt two legs out of the bottom and arms off the sides of the top. It was at this point that I realized that what she was making sort of looked like a rabbit, so I decided no scary clown for me. The teacher finished the clown, spiked the body with the head and sent us off to make our own clowns. I started mine, but instead of finishing it like a clown, I tried to make a bunny. Logistics failed me on this, as one of the arms didn't want to stay attached to the body and kept sliding off and my round blob of frosting wouldn't hold the ears. I think my problem was that I wanted the ears to stand up. I should have made a long eared bunny, so that the ears could spill down the back and therefore wouldn't have to defy gravity. Once my bunny was done, I moved on to putting flowers on my cake- so pretty! Let's take a look.
You're probably thinking we've reached the end of this entry and where does Brokeback Clowntain fit in? Well. D and I had been discussing how really the only way we'd feel okay making clowns would be if we did CSI: Clown College and had them all broken and jacked up and made our clown cakes look like a crime scene/horror movie. Since I'd turned my clown into a bunny, I didn't worry about doing that but D was all about going with our original idea. She made her clown's body and tried to attach one of the arms, but ran into the same problem I did, where one of the arms didn't want to stay attached. When it fell off, inspiration struck. She left it lying there, dismembered on the practice board, and made one regular leg for her clown and one broken one, then stuck the head in at a bizarre angle and piped "Ouch!" in front of it. It looked like this-
Next week is the final class, I believe. This is the class where we learn to make roses. There have been instructions in all the lessons and I think we were supposed to be learning it step by step, but our teacher thought it made more sense to learn everything all at once. So, next week will be Cake Class: The Rose Ceremony. I'm really excited about that. I mean, come on. Who doesn't like frosting roses? Other than my diabetic mother? Or dentists? Or people who don't like frosting in general? Hopefully it'll be really easy so I can be like that woman in that old commercial. "Oh! I worked so hard! No need to thank me, really!"
I should add, D didn't decorate her cake last week so this week she was determined to make it look like something, and here's how it turned out.
Our local craft store was offering "Enroll in cake class and we'll tell you that your friend comes free, but really we'll just charge you both half price, which is still a pretty sweet deal," so D talked me into enrolling with her. We were both pretty excited. I mean, we're in cake class! We're going to learn how to decorate cakes and that's just a few steps away from meeting Duff and being on Ace of Cakes and winning the love of Geoff, right?
One thing we didn't realize- cake class is really expensive! Even with the half price admission, you still have to buy the book and the box of started stuff and meringue powder and butter flavor and a sweet ass cake garrote and a turn table that will cause you and your friend to be all "I got two turn tables and a cake garrote, Where it's at!" in the middle of the store. Then you have to stock up on cake mix and go to your local bulk foods place and get a six pound tub of shortening (shudder) and what you and your husband refer to as "a baby" of powdered sugar because that thing is seven pounds and squirmy when you try to hold it. All in all, that's a lot of stuff, even using your shopper coupons from the craft store for a discount.
The first class was interesting. Apparently there were two D's and two Me's, so D and I picked cake class names. Because we're dorks, she became Sookie and I became Lorelai. Ah, Gilmore Girls. During class one, which was held in the middle of the store with a lot of loud people and children wandering around, the teacher showed us how to make buttercream frosting and frost a cake, then told us that at the next class we'd need to bring in our own cake, preferably looking like the one she just frosted. No problem, right?
Since I had all the frosting makings, I told D to come over with her cake the night before class and we'd go take care of business. Thanks to my two mixer bowls (Thanks mom!) I made me some frosting and D some frosting and we both set out to frost our cakes. I had made my cakes the night before and done like the teacher suggested, which would be bake it just a little under, then let it sit on the counter until you can touch the pans with your hands, then flip the cakes out onto a rack and stick the rack in a garbage bag. I shite thee nay, that really does make a tasty, moist cake. Then we were supposed to let the cakes rest and frost them the next day. D had made her cake that afternoon and put them in storage bags. Layer #1 got a chunk taken out of it when she tried to pull it out of the bag. Layer #2 broke in half. Not a problem, right? We can always frost it together. Except not so much.
While D had been waiting for me to finish making frosting, she was drinking a bottle of Arbor Mist sangria and watching my husband play the rabbit game on our wii. It took a while to make the frosting and she couldn't remember how to frost a cake because she'd been distracted by all the people in the store, so she waited for me to be ready to frost the cake. By the time I was ready, she'd had the whole bottle of sangria. Whoops! Her cake was a hot mess. I tried to help fix it and I thought it looked okay but the next day at cake class you could see that she'd taken off more frosting than she needed. Her cake had a few bare spots and you could see the crack down the center. Mine, on the other hand, looked like this-
We had to come with a design we wanted to put on the cake and frosting in colors for our design, as well as frosting to practice writing and star making. Then we spent half an hour making stars and making clusters of stars, which you use for character cakes, as well as long wavy lines and tight up and down swirly lines. We also learned writing, and my cake writing looks a lot nicer than my handwriting. That could quite possibly be because I was tracing what they wanted us to do.
After practicing, the teacher showed us how to make cones out of parchment triangles (which, I swear, I only achieved mine through witchcraft and sorcery. I have no idea how, I am not that spatially oriented) that we filled with piping gel, and then we traced our designs on wax paper and transferred them onto the cake. We had to fill in the designs with frosting using the techniques we'd learned in class. How did mine turn out?
This week's class will feature the freaky clown heads we originally refused to buy because, come on, clowns. Ew. I think we're going to learn more writing and more design work this week as well. Hopefully on Thursday I'll remember to write about it, instead of waiting forever.
Oh, and I took the cake in to work on Thursday. By the time the day was over, all that was left was one rather largeish piece that the Husband and I split at home. Everyone said it was good cake. Good deal. I hope they like this week's. I may have to turn it into CSI: Clown College to keep from being squicked out. We'll see.
I should throw in, I'm really enjoying cake class. I think I'll keep it up. The next level is flower making and I think you make a basket cake in one of the classes, which I think is cool and I've always wanted to try, and then after that it's fondant and gum paste, which is what they use a lot on those Food Network cake challenges and which sounds really exciting. I may go broke doing this.
