Nuclear frosting & adventures in cake decorating

My friend, Mimi, and I recently took a Wilton 101 cake decorating class at our local craft store. We learned basic piping skills, how to make buttercream icing and how to turn it into a festive celebration of sugar…or so we thought.

I decided to test out my skills on my co-workers, and learned a few important things:

Lesson #1: When the package says the icing colors are highly concentrated…you should believe it. Otherwise, you just might end up with alien green & florescent pink. *lol*

Lesson #2: Cake decorating is just like papercrafting…when you have an accident, you cover it up with an embellishment or decide it was a “design decision” and turn it into something else entirely.

After baking my first 8″ cake, I was attempting to frost it with thick icing & it quickly began to crumble away. Left with a divet the size of a baseball, I decided it was time to get creative. So I lopped off a fourth of the cake and turned it into this…

Any guess as to what it is? One of my co-workers said…”oh, it’s the Eiffel tower, right?”. Hmmm…not exactly what I was going for, unless you consider it in a Picasso-esque modern art kinda way. *lol*

So what was it supposed to be? Did you guess?

Yes – a purse. See the buckle & knobs on bottom? Though you can’t see it in this pic, there was a handle on top too. The HB2U is a happy birthday sentiment tag message. I mean you see purses like this in bright green & pink on the street, right?

Lesson #3: Tiered cakes are really hard to transport already assembled. I made a second mini-tiered cake in addition to the purse one using 6″, 4″ & 3″ rounds. The good news is – it didn’t crash & burn in the car…but I had it carefully perched in a cardboard box with several wood dowels supporting the insides. I used up the rest of my nuclear icing and added my co-workers’ name to the front (professional, eh?) *lol* Though it may look a little frightful, they were both pretty tasty in the end!