Merry Christmas!

I am rather late in wishing you all a Merry Christmas!  I hope that your festivities are going well and that you are with those whom you love. This year's Christmas cake has a slightly different look after I bought this cute cake ornament during my trip home in October.

 

Rudolph (described by my husband as looking like a bulldog with antlers!) is pulling his sleigh through the snowy icing and I'm glad to see that he is bringing lots of presents.  I'm not certain what happened to Santa, but I hope that he was good to you this year!

NaBloPoMo 2012

 

For the final post of NaBloPoMo 2012, I thought that I would share this cake with you.  This has been a very stressful month at work and two things have helped to maintain my sanity.  The first was sitting down and writing about my recent trip to Yorkshire and the second was my cake decorating class.

Monday was the last night of my class and we were asked to decorate a cake demonstrating some of the techniques that we had learned working with fondant and gum paste.  I adapted a design from the Wilton book and this was the result.  I thoroughly enjoyed my classes and I hope to have more time in the future to try out some of my new skills.

As for visiting and commenting on your blogs, I can only apologise and say that  I have not had time to visit, but I do appreciate those of you who have commented during NaBloPoMo 2012. 

Advanced Cake Decorating

 

I approached the advanced class with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.  My only previous experience of working with sugar paste had been a frustrating experience, with holes in my icing and sticky sugar everywhere.  Would I be able to improve on my technique?

 

The cake I chose to make this time was an orange one ~ basically another Victoria Sponge, but with grated orange instead of vanilla and an orange icing.  The iced cake was then covered in sugar paste, which we coloured ourselves.  I don't have a large selection of colours, so I chose pink and ended up with a pink thumb from all that kneading!  I discovered that the secret to covering a cake in one attempt is to use a roll and cut mat, which allows accurate sizing and makes transfer to the cake so easy.  I thought that the result looked like a floppy hat.

 

Once the sugar paste was applied to the cake, there followed a careful process of smoothing and trimming.  Yes, this is the same icing (I know that the colour looks different, but it was the lighting) and the cake is now ready for the next stage of the process.

Intermediate Cake Decorating

 

I missed the first week of the intermediate class because I was in the UK visiting my family.  This meant that I went straight into the second class with very little preparation, but at least I remembered to take an iced cake.

For my second cake, I made a Victoria Sandwich based cake and I chose the recipe from Nigella's book How To Be A Domestic Goddess, which makes a delightfully light sponge.  I filled it with vanilla buttercream and iced it in preparation for finishing.

We learnt basketweave techniques, which we practised on our boards before attempting our cakes.  Then we were shown how to do the rope technique, which is actually quite easy once I tried it for myself.  We had to pipe a message on our cakes, so I decided on Welcome Home, which seemed appropriate after my recent travels.

Cake Decorating Basics

I have wanted to take a cake decorating class for years and when the opportunity to sign up for a class presented itself recently, I hot-footed it down to enrol.  Having signed up, I then had the confusing process of purchasing equipment with only a vague idea of what was required.

Anyway, the first class was basic piping techniques and we worked on practice boards.  By the end of the evening, my hand was aching, but my piping was definitely improving.  On the second evening, we had to provide an iced cake and mine was chocolate (as requested at home!) so I decided to do a simple cream and chocolate colour scheme.  My writing was a little shaky, but not too bad for a first attempt and it fired my enthusiasm for the next stage ~ the intermediate class.