Cake Decorating Class

I've frosted a lot of cakes in my lifetime, but I've decorated very few (aside from a dash of sprinkles).  I recently took a cake decorating class where I learned a lot of good techniques, how to use certain tips and got a little practice.  I'm still no pro, but I definitely feel more comfortable with a piping bag. 

For the class, we needed to bake, fill and crumb coat a layer cake. I decided not to use springform pans, but buttered and dusted these cake pans and they came out just fine. 

I made the vanilla butter cake recipe from my James Peterson "Baking" cookbook, filled my pans and leveled them an offset spatula. The cake was frosted with buttercream (really butter-cream) and filled with lemon curd.

We decorated in class and I didn't take any photos of the process.  I like how my pretty feminine cake turned out, but I actually didn't do a lot of fancy piping work.  This was officially the last of my pink and green white chocolate fondant that I had put in my bag to take to class and decided to use it.  I piped some pretty little leaves as the border on the bottom - I love the leaf tip!  Then, I used a flower and a leaf cutter to make the fondant shapes that I arranged on the top and sides of the cake. 

This would make a very nice little girls' birthday cake!

Instead of eating this whole thing with my little girl, I spread some sunshine with the teachers at her Monstessori and donated it to their teacher lounge for a special treat.



Sesame Street Cupcakes

I've expanded upon the cupcake birthday party for my daughter's first birthday and focused on a particular theme.  She isn't really into many Disney or other characters, but definitely knows who Elmo and Cookie Monster are.  So, we had a Sesame Street birthday party complete with Elmo, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster (see below) as the sweet treats.

I ordered special cupcake papers for each one. I had the solid colors for all of them, but used the fun Elmo ones for him.

After a huge batch of buttercream and a few bottles of food coloring, I used the star tip to pipe each color on to make it look like "fur." This was the easy part...

I used white chocolate fondant and colored it black for the mouth, used white circles for the eyes, orange for Elmo's nose and yellow for Big Bird's beak.  This was the difficult part....now it was time for the assembly of a few dozen happy monsters.

They were almost fully assembled the evening prior and brought out for the finishing touches (eyes and oscars red tongue) on the day of the birthday about an hour before it started.  Here are all the monsters on display before they were gobbled up.

Big Bird's beak was a little tough to get just right.

Cookie Monster was my favorite.

Oscar's eyebrows were a little hard to get just right, but he's a little messy anyway, right?

Elmo has a huge nose! Those that liked the fondant definitely chose him!

All displayed and ready for the taking.

 

Can you tell which one the birthday girl picked out?  Yep...that would be Elmo!