Of cakes and delicious frosting

I’ve been baking for a while now, and every time I bake a cake, I frost it well, but after that I’m stuck. I have no idea how to decorate it and make it pretty and presentable. I’ve been hanging onto a few tricks like using chocolate gratings and cut fruit, beyond that….I’m blank as a whiteboard.

So to learn the decorating techniques, I decided to take up the Wilton Cake Decorating Classes at Michaels. I’m done with three classes out of the four and it is definitely well worth it. I joined these classes at the right time, coz I know how to bake and am ready to decorate cakes.

We’ve learned to make the frosting, frost a pre-baked cake and also a few decorating techniques. It isn’t as hard as I thought it would be, I’m thoroughly enjoying myself too. For all the cakes I’ve baked till now, I’ve used a whipped cream frosting, so the usual buttercream frosting is new to me. The one taught in the class is very tasty indeed and is white as snow.

Our instructor suggested we use a box cake mix as that would be easy and inexpensive too. But I'm not a big fan of the cake mix unless its chocolate. I obviously would be sharing the cakes made at class with friends and I wanted them to have a good tasting cake too. So the past classes I've used the basic yellow cake recipe from the "New Baking Book" by Better Homes and Gardens.

Basic Yellow Cake

You will need:

2 ½ cup All purpose Flour
1 ¼ cups Milk
2 ½ tsps Baking powder
½ tsp Salt
2/3 cup butter
1 ¾ cups Sugar
1 ½ tsp Vanilla extract
2 Eggs

Preheat oven to 375F. Grease and lightly flour two 8 in. pans. Stir together flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

In a mixing bowl beat butter with an electric beater on medium to high speed for 30 seconds. Add sugar and vanilla, beat until well combined. Add eggs, 1 at a time and beat and beat one minute after each addition. Add flour mixture and milk alternately to beaten mixture, beating on low speed after each addition just until combined. Pour batter into pans.

Bake for 30-35 minutes or until a wooden toothpick comes out clean. Cool layer cakes in a pans for 10 minutes and then invert onto wire racks to cool completely. Frost only after cakes have cooled completely.

These are the cakes from my second and third classes. The third class was last night and it was fun making these clown cakes. I was supposed to add another clown on top but ran out of time and it was too late when I got back home to finish it. I piped the word Clown and called it done:)

From my second class:


From my third class:


I'm looking forward to next class, where we "graduate" from Course 1. And of course we will have a Graduation cake too. More on that after the next class.

I'm sending in the Clown Cake to Bindiya for her event " My Favourite things: Cakes and Muffins"