Cake Class 101

Last night was the first meeting of the cake decorating class I'm taking this month. We meet from 6-8pm every Wednesday. I was really hoping to dive right into some hands-on decorating, but was a tad disappointed to learn the first class was mostly going through different techniques from making buttercream frosting to actually frosting the cake.

I've been baking for years so a lot of the information was not new to me. I did however learn some good tips for torting a cake and crumb coating a cake. We also learned to make the three different types of buttercream frosting, which are hard, medium, and soft textures.

I'm planning on taking all 4 levels offered, so I'm going to purchase a caddy where I can keep all of my cake/cupcake decorating tools. They are currently floating all over my kitchen drawers which is very inconvenient. This caddy will allow me to put everything from piping bags to tips to my leveler in one spot.

Our homework for the next class is to bake a 9 inch round cake and have it frosted with a medium consistency buttercream that is colored blue. I'm also to bring 1.5 cups medium frosting in two colors. At the next class we will actually learn the decorating techniques and decorate our cake with a rainbow and practice writing.