My Wilton Portfolio – Chapter #3: Gerbera Daisy Cupcakes

I love making Gerbera Daisies!  I remember the first time I made them in class.  I thought it almost looked too cartoonish to be taken seriously as a floral decoration.  Turns out it wasn’t the flower or the technique.  It was my complete inexperience at making this flower.  Now it is one of my favorites.  So much so that Chapter #3 was originally supposed to be another project.  I couldn’t wait for this one and skipped ahead.
 

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Gerbera Daisy Cupcakes

My Wilton Portfolio – Chapter #2: Floral Finish and Rosebud Boutonnieres

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You’re probably thinking I abandoned my Wilton Portfolio Project with only the first chapter.  Not so!  I just haven’t written about it, which is silly since this is a blog and it depends on my actually writing stuff after I’ve made it and decorated it.

This particular project is from the second class – Flowers and Cake Design.  The medium I’m working in is Gum Paste, Fondant and Royal Icing

What I'm Making/Made this Week - June 25 through July 1, 2012

I have been cooking.  It's just that I'm doing it a little at a time.  One thing for sure is that our mourning process for one of our pug clean-up crew requires a lot of comfort food and sweets.

Here's what I've made so far:

Monday is Vegan Day and I found another recipe out of Vegan Diner by Julie Hasson that I wanted to make.  Then I added it to one of my favorites from the book that I already made.  I present to you Home-Style Loaf with Garlic Mashers...

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Home-Style Loaf with Garlic Mashers

My Wilton Portfolio – Chapter #1

Last week, I finished my final Wilton class.  Four Classes in three months.  Sounds exhausting, but I really had a great time and I’m sad it’s over.

Now I have to figure out what to do with my newly acquired skills.  Truth is, I’ve learned a lot, but I’m by no means an expert at decorating cakes, cupcakes and cookies.  I need practice!  So what I’ve decided to do is bake and decorate my way through the lesson books.

To keep from getting bored with one medium, I’m going to alternate between each of the four class books starting with the first one – Decorating Basics.

My first chapter of this undertaking is found on page 16 of the Decorating Basics book and called Party Partners.  (P.S. You can buy the lesson manuals from Joann's Fabrics without taking the class, so if you want to follow along, but don't want to take the class, jump on-line or head over to the nearest store)  Wilton has a lot of their designs on-line, but unfortunately, there’s no picture available for this one so I’ll give you the quick run-down of what the lesson entails.

• Preparing Roll-Out Cookie and Chocolate Roll-Out Cookie Recipes and cut using a round cookie cutter.
• Decorating the Chocolate Cookies with:
• Snowflake Star
• Spiral of Stars
• Baby Carriage
• Large Star
• Daisy Flower
• Decorating the Plain Roll-Out Cookies with:
• Star Flower
• Blue Star
• Heart
• Number 1

Advanced Gum Paste Flowers – Class #3

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We’ve had a couple classes of making parts of flowers and leaves.  When you’re dealing with ornate flowers, they have to be made in pieces and then fully dried before assembling and detailing them.

Tonight, we pull together almost all of our flowers.  Also, we make some of the other flowers we finished prettier.

Advanced Gum Paste Flowers – Class #2

One of the things about making these ornate gum paste flowers is that you have to make them piece at a time and dry them thoroughly before moving to the next step.  By “dry them thoroughly” I mean 24-28 hours.  The classes are jam packed and fun, but maybe the blog posts aren’t as interesting as when I was turning out multiple designs every class.

So this class is a lot of prep work again, but I promise you’re going to see some incredible flowers after the third class.  Or at least I hope you will - it kind of depends on my skill level.  And of course there’s a lovely flower we started and finished in class in one evening.

Here is lesson plan for this course.  The red, bold text is what we covered in the class:

• Blossoms
• Gerber Daisies
• Sweet Peas
• Ivy Leaves
• Lily Leaves
• Briar Rose
• Stargazer Lily
• Stephanotis
• Assemble Blossoms, Leaves and Bouquets
• Using Flower Spikes

If you’re paying attention to the syllabus, you’ll notice I kind of skipped over the Sweet Peas.  We didn’t actually, but we only formed the Sweet Pea base.  We’ll be finishing them in class #3, but tonight we started out making several leaves.

First was the Ivy Leaf.  If you think it is as easy as cutting out a leaf shape and then drawing a pattern on it, you’re SO wrong.  You have to roll out the gum paste on a grooved board.  This creates a ridge on the back of your leaf.  Since these leaves are grouped together, you have to attach a piece of florist wire to the back using the ridge to keep it in place.  Easy, right?

Yeah, not at all.

Once you get the wire attached, you have to press the leaf impression to get the veins.  The impression mat was not cooperating for me and I had to try a lot of different positions to get the imprint visible.  Pressing around the wire is difficult because you’re not dealing with thick gum paste.  It has been rolled thin, so pressing too close to the wire exposes it.

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Ivy Leaf

Advanced Gum Paste Flowers – Class #1

This week I started the final Wilton course in cake decorating – Advanced Gum Paste Flowers.  I am excited and a little bit sad.  I couldn’t wait to get started, but I’ve really enjoyed these classes and am sad that soon I’m going to be done with them.

Gum Paste and Fondant – Class #4: The Final Class

Tonight was our last class and you know what that means: FINAL PROJECTS!  We still had a couple of things to cover, but the majority of the class was doing our final design.

But first… here is what we covered this night from the class lesson plan for this course:

• Gum Paste and Fondant 101
• Bow Loops
• Mum Base, Rose Base
• Carnation Base
• Assembling a Bow
• Tinting Gum Paste and Fondant
• Basic Principles of Floral Cake Design
• Calla Lily
• Rosebud and Rose
• Carnation
• Calyxes and Leaves
• Assembling the Calla Lily
• Daisy
• Mum
• Covering a Cake Board with Fondant
• Elements of Fondant Cake Design
• Creating Geometric Designs Using Cut-Outs, Overlays, and Inlays
• Eyelet, Ruffle, and Ball Borders

We had to cover our cakes with fondant and Maria taught us a couple of techniques on how to do it.  I managed to get my cake covered with only a couple of dimples… not bad for my first try.  I did have some boo-boos at the bottom, but that’s the beauty of using a border.  Hides all boo-boos quite well, thank you very much.

I practiced the different borders and decided my ruffle border looked the best.  It didn’t take me too long to get my border completed and placed on the cake, so I moved on to the design.

After a long decision making process – which included me whining a lot – I decided on a version of Wilton’s Creative Calla Lilies Cake and their Small Cake, Big Ideas Cake.  I wanted the small cluster so I could write a “Happy Birthday” message on it.  However, the small cluster on “Small Cake, Big Ideas” was too small, so I wanted to pile them the Creative Calla Lilies cake.

I also had not practiced applying small decorations to the side or cutting out and assembling letters.  I worked slow and steady and this was my end result…

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Gum Paste and Fondant – Class #3

I can’t believe there is only one class left after this!  I’m having so much fun with this class that time is just flying by.  I signed up for the final course in the series too, Advanced Gum Paste Flowers with Maria.  Of course, now I’m getting ahead of myself… let’s get back to Gum Paste and Fondant and what I learned this week.

Here is what we covered this night from the class lesson plan for this course:

• Gum Paste and Fondant 101
• Bow Loops
• Mum Base, Rose Base
• Carnation Base
• Assembling a Bow
• Tinting Gum Paste and Fondant
• Basic Principles of Floral Cake Design
• Calla Lily
• Rosebud and Rose
• Carnation
• Calyxes and Leaves
• Assembling the Calla Lily
• Daisy
• Mum
• Covering a Cake Board with Fondant
• Elements of Fondant Cake Design
• Creating Geometric Designs Using Cut-Outs, Overlays, and Inlays
• Eyelet, Ruffle, and Ball Borders

These flowers are the most difficult I’ve made to date.  It took several tries for me to get some pretty enough to photograph.  Then there’s the mum, but here I am getting ahead of myself again.

We started with Daisies.  Using the daisy cut-outs takes a lot of time to perfect.  Even with the most precise cutting, you’re going to end up with rough edges that you’ll have to clean up.  Considering you are working with gum paste, it is going to have to be done quickly.

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Gum Paste and Fondant
Daisy

Flowers and Cake Design – Class #4: The Final Class

So it’s the final week and that means final project cakes.  The hardest thing about the final cake is picking the design.  Sure, Wilton gives you some ideas, but there are a lot of different things you have to keep in mind.

Since we still had 2 techniques to learn, we were going to have approximately 90 minutes to finish the cake.  If you ever watch any of the Food Network cake challenges, you know the biggest weakness of the majority of the designers is they plan too big of a design to complete in the time they are given.  That is one thing I have in common with them.  The things I don’t have in common?  Insane cake decorating talent. 

Er, okay, mediocre cake decorating talent. 

Sigh… basic cake decorating talent

Gum Paste and Fondant – Class #2

Last week we did a lot of prep work and made our lovely bow.  It was an incredibly busy class, but we didn’t have a lot to show at the end of the night. 

Class #2 was a totally different story!

We made several flowers with stems, calyxes (the outermost part of the flower) and leaves.  Something else happened too… I didn’t feel overwhelmed!  I truly enjoyed working with the gum paste and fondant and could have done it for hours more.

Here is what we covered in this night from the class lesson plan for this course:

• Gum Paste and Fondant 101
• Bow Loops
• Mum Base, Rose Base
• Carnation Base
• Assembling a Bow
• Tinting Gum Paste and Fondant
• Basic Principles of Floral Cake Design
• Calla Lily
• Rosebud and Rose
• Carnation
• Calyxes and Leaves
• Assembling the Calla Lily
• Daisy
• Mum
• Covering a Cake Board with Fondant
• Elements of Fondant Cake Design
• Creating Geometric Designs Using Cut-Outs, Overlays, and Inlays
• Eyelet, Ruffle, and Ball Borders

I’d also like to note that this is a different teacher than the other classes.  They both have distinct teaching styles and I love them both!  Maria, our instructor for this course, does a high-level overview at the front, then walks to each table critiquing our work and giving us a close-up demo on how to fix it.  The great thing about this is if we go a little faster, we can make more flowers or give them more detail.

I LOVE IT!

We started with Calla Lilies.  We had to form the petal and center first to let them dry.  Then we assembled the dried pieces and finished with the calyx.  The end result is this:

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Flowers and Cake Design – Class #3

Good Gravy!  This class is just flying along!  And not just the number of classes we’ve gone through already.  The class itself seems to be over as soon as it starts.

I learned a lesson this week that I feel like I should share with you because no matter where you take this class, you probably won’t hear it.

If you get royal icing on any facial hair and it dries, be prepared to lose some hair.

You’re welcome.  And no, I will not tell you how I found that out… just take my word for it.

What we covered this week from the class lesson plan, as listed on Wilton’s website, is in the RED BOLD text.

• Basic Principles of Cake Design
• Gum Paste and Fondant 101
• Button Flower
• Pansy
• Making Royal Icing
• Making a Parchment Bag
• Flower Nail
• Rose Base, Rose Center
• Apple Blossom, Primrose
• Rosebud
• Wilton Rose
• Daffodil
• Violet
• Using the Lily Nail, Lily
• Guidelines for Flower Arrangments
• Floral Cake Design
• Making Stems
• Reverse Shell
• Basketweave

I came armed with royal icing in every color of the rainbow.  Okay, that’s stretching the truth a little… I had pink, yellow, violet and green.

Last week we practiced making Rose bases and this week we finished it.  While they both start the same, this is quite different from the Ribbon Rose we learned in Basic Cake Decorating – Lesson #4.  That’s probably a good thing since my buttercream ribbon roses didn’t look too hot.

The Rose starts with a base that is closed.  Then three layers of leaves are added in steps.  It differs from the Ribbon rose in that each layer is comprised of smaller leaves, not a single layer.  Here is my best one from the night:

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Finished Rose
Does this flower kick butt?  Why yes it does!  No, no... no applause is necessary.

Gum Paste and Fondant – Class #1

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This week began the third class in the Wilton series of cake decorating.  A course named Gum Paste and Fondant.

At first I was a little confused.  The second class that I started a couple of weeks ago and documented here and here worked with gum paste and fondant as well.  After this class, I figured out the difference.  Flowers and Cake Design is just that… creating flowers in different mediums including fondant and gum paste. 

I know, I’m a genius to have figured that out.

Flowers and Cake Design – Class #2

This was one of those classes where you sat down, got your equipment out and before you knew it, it was time to clean up.  After 6 classes, I got into a groove and kept up with the pace of the class.  And you know what else?  I kicked butt this time around too.

Yeah, I said it.

I think we finally covered something I am kind of good at and I’ve decided that I will only decorate with Royal Icing.

Okay, enough patting myself on the back.  Let’s get to it.

What we covered this week from the class lesson plan, as listed on Wilton’s website, is in the RED BOLD text:

• Basic Principles of Cake Design
• Gum Paste and Fondant 101
• Button Flower
• Pansy
• Making Royal Icing
• Making a Parchment Bag
• Flower Nail
• Rose Base, Rose Center
• Apple Blossom, Primrose
• Rosebud
• Daffodil
• Violet
• Using the Lily Nail, Lily
• Making Stems
• Guidelines for Flower Arrangments
• Floral Cake Design
• Reverse Shell
• Basketweave
• Wilton Rose

We had to bring in Royal Icing we made at home.  I chose to make pink and yellow icing for my flowers.  We practiced making Rose Bases first in preparation for making Roses next week.  Luckily for me, it is almost the same technique as the roses we made out of butter cream.  Even better was that the cake I made for Easter had many roses on it, so I had a lot of practice over the weekend.

We then moved on to the Apple Blossom.  This is a very delicate flower (sometimes called a filler flower since you can use it to fill blank space where you intended none to be) that is a little trickier than it looks.  Each leaf is made independently yet you have to have them connect seamlessly in the middle or the flower will fall apart. 

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Easter Cake

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve practiced what I learned in my first Decorating class, so I decided to make a cake for an Easter Brunch my husband and I are going to be attending.  There’s one thing I learned…

I need more practice.

I made a lovely white cake with a pistachio filling.  That was about all that went right.

It started with my filling – I used too much of it…. or I didn’t make a big enough frosting border… whatever… I had pistachio oozing out the side of my cake.  How did I fix it?  I sealed in the sides with a gigantic blob of frosting using a ridiculously wide decorating tip.  Problem solved.  Of course, as I was trying to smooth out the sides and top, I occasionally would open a fissure in the frosting blob that I’d have to fill back over, but I managed to keep it together.

My simple inscription “Happy Easter” looked like a kindergartner wrote it.  I tried to fix it with a toothpick, but it still looked a little shaky.

My roses, while much prettier than my first try, I still had some issues.  I had a good consistency for my frosting, but my hand kept heating it up.  The result was droopy roses that were very difficult to get on my cake.  I tried to fill in some of the sliding roses with leaves.  In the end, you could tell I was trying to hide something.

In short, here’s what went well:

Baking the cake

Making the filling

Shell Border

What went wrong – everything else.

I know you’re dying to see the result…

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Notice the abundance of leaves in the middle of the roses?  Just ignore that.  Okay?  Great.

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Here is a better shot of the shell and polka-dot border.  I was proud of the way that turned out.

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The Roses - Some of them turned out lovely but I massacred them while putting them on the cake.

See what I mean?

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He's a sad droopy flower.

Still, I’m going to take it tomorrow.  I figure Easter is a solemn occasion that could use a little levity.  We’re all going to get a good chuckle out of my decorating attempt.

Happy Easter to all and… happy baking!