Saturday, April 4, 2009

Wilton 2

In February I took Wilton 2 classes. Wilton 2 emphasizes flowers and introduces a couple new icings. Whereas Wilton 1 used only Buttercream icing, Wilton 2 added Royal icing and Color Flow to our repertoire.

We learned how to make rosebuds. The ones in the picture are made of royal icing, but in class we used buttercream. They're not bad and look great as part of a rose spray. That same week we also made chyrsanthemums, but I don't have any pictures because I didn't like a single one that I made, so I trashed them all.



The next week we used color flow to make these ugly birds. Color flow is interesting stuff. It smells and tastes horrible. It's redeeming quality is that it can be used to make plaques that are hard as a rock. This bird was supposed to go on my final cake in this course, but as you can see, I never even got around to removing the bird from the waxed paper. Maybe some day.

We also made our first batch of royal icing. I had never worked with it before, so I had no idea what to expect. Somehow I added WAY too much water, so it was super thin. It wasn't good at all. In class I added in extra powdered sugar, but I still didn't have it at the right consistency until the next day when I added even more p. sugar at home. Petals lose definition if the icing isn't stiff enough.

We learned apple blossoms, violets (see final cake pictures below), and violet leaves.










We also learned daisies, but some of mine could easily pass as a sun on a southwestern themed cake.










Daffodils are probably my all-time favorite flower in real life. Icing daffodils are cute, but not quite as high on my list.








Primroses are simple and would be great fillers.











These three roses are not Wilton Roses. They are Victorian Roses. The technique is the same, but it uses a different tip which produces a softer petal edge. I prefer the Victorian Rose to the Wilton Rose. I dried all the flowers except the rosebuds in flower formers (think paper towel core cut in half). The purple flower got mushed when I put it in the former to dry.

In Wilton 2 we only made one cake. The last week of class we learned the basketweave and rope border at the beginning of class. Then the rest of class was spent decorating our cakes. The basketweave is not difficult, but it is tedious and repetitive. My hand was tired by the time I got all the way around this small oval cake. How come whenever we practice something we do it perfectly, but when we do it for real, we don't do it as well? I did the rope well on my practice board, but on the cake it looks like the rope is unraveling.

The pansy was probably my favorite flower in this class. The ones on the top of the cake were all purple, all yellow or purple and yellow. On the bottom border I placed violet flowers and violet leaves.

1 comment:

  1. Nice! I wish I could decorate a cake like that!

    Pam

    ReplyDelete