Wilton Course II, Class 4

I finished up Wilton Course II last night. It was fun to actually bring a cake to work on. You feel so much more accomplished when you leave class with a fully decorated cake!

(I interrupt this regularly scheduled post to report that sunlight just broke through the clouds and is shining through my window. Yes, that's right. SUN! We literally have not seen the sun in over a week. It's depressing. Anyway, I'm sure it won't last long. In fact, it's already fading back behind another cloud. Boo.)

We started class by learning and practicing basketweave. We started off on the practice boards, flat on the table. Then we put the practice boards on the stand so we could try to do the basketweave on an upright surface (much more challenging). Once we had that down, we moved on to learning the rope border. Pretty easy. Not much different than a shell, it's just you have to make small "S" shapes over and over.

Then we got to move onto our cakes! Very exciting. We started off with the basketweave, which took much more time and a lot more icing than I ever anticipated. Holy cow, my finished cake is HEAVY! There is a lot of buttercream on that sucker.


Next time, I would expand the basketweave by going up one more row at the top. I didn't quite cover the entire side, even after adding the rope border, so I'm not 100% pleased with how it looks. After finishing the basketweave, I did a rope border on the top and bottom edges of the cake.


Then it was time to bust out the flowers that we spent three classes making. I had way more flowers than I actually needed for this cake, so I picked over them and chose some of the best ones for the cake. Some of them broke as I was transferring them off of the wax paper and onto the cake (I'm looking at you, daisies!) but most were pretty successful. I did my best to arrange them in a nice way, then filled in gaps and made them look more natural by piping in some buttercream leaves.


Ended it all by adding one of my colorflow birds to the side.


Tada! I'm pretty happy with the results. I'm bringing the cake into work today, and judging from their past reactions, I know I'm going to have to argue to get them to even cut into it and eat it. It's a cake, people! You're supposed to eat it!