Wilton Course 1 Class 4: The Final Flower Cake

The Final Flower Cake

I am a little sad to say that I already went to my last class of the Wilton Decorating Basics course. I had so much fun that I wish we would have more classes (and my decorating needs some practice, too).

For the last class, I wanted to make a carrot cake decorated with colorful roses. My daughter requested pink flowers, that is why I decided to top my final project with pink, red and yellow flowers, similar to a cake pictured in the lesson plan. Since I was also in the middle of getting ready for our big summer trip, I bought a Betty Crocker Carrot Cake Mix. It saves time and tastes great.

One day before class I baked two 9-inch round carrot cakes using the cake mix. I prepared cream cheese frosting (see Recipes tap) which I used as a filling between the two cakes. While looking for containers to use for coloring icing and storing it, I found great storage containers: Ziploc® Brand Twist ’n Loc® Containers. They were on sale at our local Walmart and I stocked up on several of them.

For my cake I needed a lot of different icing: white icing in thin consistency for icing the cake, red icing in thin consistency mixed with a little piping gel for writing, green icing in thin consistency for the leaves and red, pink and yellow icing in stiff consistency for the roses.

Here is a summary of my final class of the Wilton Decorating Basics course:

1. At home I filled and iced my cake with white icing in thin consistency. I did that the morning before class. That way the icing had some time to dry and I was able to smooth it before taking the cake to class. Smoothing the cake is still challenging for me. I guess it will take a lot more practice to get the perfect smooth cake. Let me know if you have any tricks and tips. I can use them!
2. The first thing we learned in class was how to write a message on a cake. It is not my favorite thing to do, because it is not as easy as writing with a pen on paper, but writing messages on a cake is an important skill. Sometimes the message is the most important part of the cake and it has to be done right. If you write with your left hand you might want to learn writing on a cake with your right hand. It is certainly a challenge to write backwards or develop any other technique.
3. Since Wilton offers a different course curriculum starting this June, we learned the ribbon rose during this Decorating Basics course, which, I think, is different from the past Course 1. Personally, I like the past regular rose better than the ribbon rose, but hopefully I will learn that rose during a future course. The ribbon rose consists of a base (made with tip #12), which looks like little mount of icing. The rose petals are added using tip #104 in several rows around the base. It is essential to do this with the flower nails, because you need to rotate the nail while squeezing the icing bag in one steady position. My cake needed 12 ribbon roses in 3 colors (red, pink and yellow). This took quite a while since I only had one tip #12 and one tip #104 which I needed to change between the different colored bags of icing. It is helpful to have several couplers, so switching tips does not become a problem. I thought the roses would get better the more a made, but by rose #12 my hand was hurting from squeezing all this stiff icing, that the roses were getting worse instead of better.
4. When I finished all my twelve roses I left them out to dry for a while. During the drying time a wrote my little message on the cake and created a border on the bottom of the cake. I wanted to put some more designs on my cake, but time was running out and I needed to put all the roses on top. It was impossible for me to drive home with all those single roses without breaking them. Before placing the roses on the cake, I piped a good amount of white icing (using tip #12) where the flowers would be placed to secure them. That technique also makes the flowers look more natural, because they do not sit flat on top of the cake. I do not have a flower lifter, so I used a regular spatula to slide the roses off the flower squares and positioned them on the cake.
5. At home I added some little dots in the colors of the roses on the side of the cake.

I am very happy with my final cake of this Wilton Decorating Basics class and I am looking forward to the next one. Please share your Wilton class or at home decorating experience with me. I would love to hear from you and see your cake creations!