Cakes for Lauren and Sheridan

My first cakes outside of class were for my next-door-neighbors, Lauren and Sheridan. They are a cute pair of twins who were turning four. They've since moved to Colorado, but my son Drew still misses "Lauriden" dearly.

We don't have cable, so I wasn't sure who Little Bear was. But that's the beauty of the Internet! In a few short minutes I had coloring sheets of both Blue and Little Bear that I could transfer onto my cakes. The internet is pretty much an invaluable tool every time I do a cake, since it's chalk-full of ideas and pictures of other people's cakes.

Here's Sheridan's cake. Note that it was chocolate, and I had a mishap with the frosting...it looks a bit speckled! But luckily it didn't clash with the bear (at least that's what I tell myself.)


And here's Lauren's Blue's Clues cake.

Clown Cake...Scary?

Ah, the clown cake. It struck terror for some of the people in my class, but I for one don't have issues with clowns, so onward I went.



I was interested to see how frosting could hold up those plastic clown heads. It did...that's all I'm gonna say about that.


Note that it was not my daughter's birthday, but her name graced the cake nonetheless.

Cake, the Second

Now for my second cake, I decided to make the flower cake. If I remember correctly, our teacher missed class for (not ironically at all) gum surgery. On her gums. Where she didn't have teeth. Anyway...there was not so much guidance given on this cake. Looking back, I can see that my frosting was too stiff to create pretty flowers. And I was not allowing enough frosting to come out of the bag. I do like the pink, though!


Don't you think the classy plastic cup from the 1970s is a nice touch in this photo? I clearly wasn't sure where this cake thing was going at that point...

My First Cake

For my first ever "decorated" cake, I did the Rainbow cake. It's the first option in the Hobby Lobby Buttercream I course, and everybody makes it. It was my first time mixing frosting colors. (Question to self: is there a difference between frosting and icing? Can I call myself a cake decorator if I don't know the difference? I digress.) For my first time, I was pretty pleased!



As I quickly learned, one of the hardest parts of cake decorating is the actual cakes. I consider it the canvas and the frosting the "paint"...and it's hard to have a pretty painting on a lumpy canvas. I've gotten a lot better at this in the past year, but it was definitely a struggle at first.

Note that my slipper-wearing teacher did the cloud on the left...see how pretty it looks? Mine is the globbier one on the right.

I Stumble Into Cake Decorating

In the summer of 2008, my friend Nicole called and asked if I'd like to take a cake decorating class with her. Nicole's little boy was turning one, and she wanted to be able to decorate his first birthday cake. Since I was a stay-at-home mom of two kids and the prospect of spending the next six Saturdays out of the house sounded absolutely great, I said yes.

I consider myself relatively artistic--I always loved art class in school, and had even taken several ceramics and oil painting classes after I graduated from college. However, I wasn't totally sure that my artistic inclinations would translate into cake success.

At the first class, our teacher (a sweet woman who had very few teeth and wore house slippers to class) told us all about the tools we'd need and the fact that we'd need to bake a cake and two batches of icing each week for the next five weeks. I, for some reason, was surprised by this. I mean, I'm not sure what I thought I'd be decorating...Anyway, I was thankful that my husband works at a school and that I could send the cakes away with him instead of eating all of them.

Within a couple of weeks I figured out that I had a knack for decorating cakes, and what's more, I actually liked it! For one: I like food, and sweets in particular. And two: it's fun to be part of people's special events. Birthdays, baby showers...it seems that everyone gravitates toward the cake.

In my next posts I'll show the cakes I made in class, followed by the cakes I made in the aftermath of class. Hopefully you'll see progress over the past year and a half!

And Nicole: thanks for inviting me to cake class! Even though we never learned the Wilton Rose and are technically cake class dropouts, I think we still got our money's worth!