Wilton Course 2, Final Basketweave Cake

What's Baking?
My last cake - final - for Course 2.  I had class this morning and made a Heavenly White Cake (Colette Peter's recipe) with Chocolate Buttercream Icing (Wilton recipe), Royal Icing flowers and Color Flow butterfly.  It was a lot of fun to make although the basketweave is very time consuming, so are the flowers and color flow, too.  I guess it will get faster the more I practice.  It was hard piping all that buttercream icing while smelling the chocolate the whole time!

I am quite pleased with the way it turned out considering it was my first time doing basketweave, those kinds of flowers and color flow and I was very excited to be able to give this cake to a friend who is hosting a brunch tomorrow for Palm Sunday!

More Practice - More Royal Icing Flowers

Wilton Course 2, weeks 2 and 3 - RI flower practice

A few of the royal icing flowers I learned how to make on Saturday--Wilton Course 2, classes 2 and 3 combined.  Great teacher, but I need to practice, practice, practice and make a bunch for my cake final coming up on Saturday.  Would like to get that all done before I clean out the kitchen and start preparing for the Seders.  Looking forward to learning how to make a basket weave pattern in butter cream.

As usual, you can click on photos to enlarge them and comments are always welcome!  Funny thing, I started to add a few photos of finished cakes to Facebook and I got a couple of comments there!  Maybe it's easier to comment there or it's just my friends being nice!  Anyway, thanks for looking!

Chocolate Ganache Cake

What's Baking?
After yesterday's cake. I decided to try to learn more about chocolate ganache so I made Chocolate Ganache Cake  from Epicurious (Minor variations include using very strong espresso coffee instead of the espresso powder and boiling water since I recently ran out of espresso powder.  And I only had 1 cup of brown sugar so I used that and some white, but cut back the total amount.)

Birthday Cake

What's Baking?

Wilton Course 3, Final Cake

What's Baking?

Getting Ready for Wilton 3 Final!

RI Flowers

Royal icing flowers from class.  Morning glory, lily, poinsettia and petunia.  Need lots of practice!  Next week the tiered cake.

Royal Icing, Wilton course 3

Looking forward to working with royal icing and class tomorrow (was snowed out last week).  I need to make some using the Wilton recipe and color it for making a variety of flowers.  I've never worked with royal icing and am a bit concerned about two things I've heard about. 

Operation Baking GALS, round 17

I just got back from the post office and had taken a few quick pictures as I was packing up this package. I baked a double batch of mini-chocolate chip shortbread cookies, cut in squares, and included brownies and banana bread that some friends had baked.  I also put in a bag of marshmallows -good for padding (and snacking!).  It's a great way to show our appreciation and it's nice to be part of larger group baking and supporting our troops.