Cakes

Last month, my good friend and fellow FTC member and I took a Cake Decorating 101 (or, Wilton's Cake Decorating Class, Level 1) through UVU's Community Education program.

We were fairly excited about the prospect of discovering some amazing, untapped, innate skill that when put to use would make us millions of dollars when we opened our own bakery. Then, we tried to frost our cakes. Even the crumb coat was a pain in the butt, and over four weeks, we decided that this was maybe not our calling.

We did have fun. In fact, I think the class voted us as those that had the most fun. (Although, that is probably more because we sat removed from the rest of our class mocking them instead of joining their very friendly, very strange all-inclusive group.) And while they didn't know that we were often laughing at them, they heard a lot of snickering and giggling and assumed we were having a good time.

The first cake, we showed everyone up with ability to do cute designs and excellent borders. Our cakes were round. And we even sliced them apart and put in a very sugary filling. Most people who ate the cake were not so impressed with the frosting (Wilton frosting is disgusting) and the filling made the cake extra sugary.

The next week, we practiced on cupcakes, and got bored.... or.... something, and they turned out like this:

But the last class was a disaster. The cakes cooked too hot (my conjecture) and didn't come out of the pan. We tried to glue all the pieces together, but we were using frosting that was much too heavy. We didn't quite have enough frosting, so we made do. In the end, we had lopsided, non-circle cakes. Both of us were in bad moods.

We learned how to make roses and do writing in our last class. By the end, all the other ladies were working hard on their cakes to make them look presentable and classy. Meghan and I had given up from the beginning. They ended up looking something like this:

Pure magic. One of the tricks that I learned in this class was to use a Hersey kiss as the center of the roses. I couldn't believe how much EASIER it made making those blasted flowers.

In the end, Meghan and I learned that we weren't really cut out for the grunt work of cake decorating, i.e., the crumb coat and frosting of the cake; we weren't cut out for the real creativity of the whole thing; and we definitely weren't really cut out for the detail work.

Don't hold your breath for a Pottsie Bakery to turn up any time soon.