First session of class is over...(updated)

Well guys, tonight marked the end of my first session of cake decorating class. You might think I would be really sad and devastated about this, and I probably would be if the 2nd session didn't start on MONDAY! Wooo!! haha
First of all, I realize I have pretty much abandoned my poor blog for the last week, and I promise I had a reason. What is that reason? Well I simply didn't want to "over-bake" myself. My mom and I (well more like my mom) did a lot of baking for Easter, and I didn't want to burn myself out before my final cake.


This final cake that I did today took me through a lot of stress! I really wanted to make a statement with is and not just throw a bunch of stuff on it...I wanted it to have a purpose. Last night I got my cake baked and made up a batch of frosting. My plan was to frost my cake last night, but I ended up practicing and going through SO many ideas that the frosting ended up being useless. But honestly, I am sure my roommates wanted to kill me because I was just asking too many questions and being really nit-picky. Finally, after over 2+ hours of piping out ideas, I finally found one that I loved. Here are the failures...

My original idea was to do these flowers all over the cake with 2 layers of the flowers

So I mixed up some colors to see how it would look. I wish I could go back and tell past Bri what horrible color choices these were! 

I know, right?! So, this turned me off to the whole idea. I felt it just looked like a big pile of frosting. I still can't get over how terrible those colors were. Ick!

 But of course I still wanted to make the flowers work some how. I thought maybe I could do the frosting of the cake green and then go around it with 2 solid color flowers. Yeah...not so much.

No words for how this looked. Would it help to say I had consumed a few glasses of wine?

 Ok, that was enough of this design concept! Time to start over...

Literally! I scraped off my board and it was on to the next idea.

 I went to a bunch of blogs looking for ideas, and I finally found one. So I started practicing those flowers.

Roses!

 The next big thing I had to decide was colors. I honestly went back and forth on this issue for close to an hour. Should I color the roses? Should I leave the roses white and color the background of the cake? Should I make them multicolored? Yeah, you get the idea. The obvious choice was to color either the cake or the roses red. But, here's a tip. The darker the food coloring you use, the more of a bitter taste the frosting gets. So if I would have colored my whole cake (or all of the roses) red, it would have had a really bitter/unpleasant taste.  So I decided I wanted the roses white, but I wanted to play around with different colored backgrounds.

 Those are the colors that I tried, even though I knew red would taste bad, I still wanted to try it. I looked at them for a long time, and honestly, I did not like the look of the background being colored. The whole cake would be white, that was my final decision. For the base frosting I decided to go with vanilla extract and almond for the roses. Why the 2 different flavors? No, it's not just my indecisiveness, there really is a reason. If almond flavor it used, the frosting will be a very bright white color; whereas if you use vanilla, it will have a slight off white color (unless you spend the big bucks to get the clear vanilla extract).
The next day I decided i wanted this cake to have some height to it, so I baked another cake. I figured that a rectangle flower cake wouldn't look as good as a rounder shaped one, which led me to trim up the cake. Looking back on this, it was a very big risk considering my ability to cut things crooked and just stuipdness when it comes to doing things like this. Well, all I could do was get out a template and cross my fingers.

Don't mind my shopping list.

I also cut the "skin" off of the top to reduce crumbs.

 Did I mention I was going to fill this cake? Yup. With strawberries. No big deal. I cut the other half of the cake the same way and prepped one side for the filling.

If you use filling that is rather runny, you want to put a layer of frosting around the edges to prevent leaking. 

If the layer of frosting turns out to not be high enough once the other half is put on, just go back and fill in the gaps.

Next I had to frost the entire cake; I had to do this before class started.

All frosted. If you are going to be covering the cake like I would be, the background frosting doesn't need to be pretty. Mine even had crumbs in it...GASP!

All that was left to do was start piping!

 I did the roses all over. I was so happy with how elegant it looked when I was done! It has a pretty heavy wedding vibe to it, but it was just awesome to look at. I received a lot of compliments on it during class, so I am taking that as a sign it turned out ok. I was talking with a classmate and was talking about deciding to leave it white and blah blah blah...so she pulls out some food color spray.(look here) I had seen this before and considered using it on my cake, but didn't want to go out and buy any. She very nicely offered to let me try some on my cake if I wanted. So do I leave it white for good...or experiment with the spray color...

I went for it!

SO happy with the color and how much more detail it gave it!!!

So that was it! I still have yet to cut into it, (I will be tonight!) but I will post pictures of the inside later tonight.
I learned so much from this first level class, I just cannot wait to see what the next level has to offer. Thank you all again for continuing to go on this journey with me :)

Totally going to frame this!!

Sadly, the beauty had to come to an end

It was sad to cut into!!

However, it still looked pretty on the inside