Week 2: Desserts

Week 2 was cakes and pies.  We made 1 pie and 10 different cakes. I went into this week SUPER excited.  My mom had taught me quite and bit and I felt like I was going to do awesome....yeah, well....I'm a "sloppy" project person.  I always have been.  I complete something and it never looks "finished" just somewhat sloppy.  ALL PROJECTS.  I'm not quite sure why, but for some reason, I thought this wouldn't be the case in cakes....Needless to say, it was a rough week.  Haha! The first day was cake building and playing with icing on waxed paper.  One of the guys in my class made beautiful shell borders (the border you use on pretty much EVERY dang cake!).  Mine were, oh, sloppy looking.  The building part was put a slab of ice cream on a piece of cake and shape it to have nice corners.  Sounds easy enough, right?  Oh wait, I said corners with ICE CREAM.  It goes from too hard to shape to too soft to shape in the blink of an eye. The other guy built perfectly square cakes (of course he did).  Making corners on starting to melt ice cream proved to be trickier than I had imagined, along with my sloppy shell borders.  I left day one somewhat deflated. 

Day 2 was more playing with icing and this time frosting the cakes.  Baskin uses 2 types of product to ice the cakes.  Ice cream and this stuff called Pastry Pride which is pretty much like Cool Whip, but tastes better, same consistency.  So then you are covering your frozen cake with soft ice cream.  The ice cream freezes to the cake while the ice cream underneath is starting to melt.  Now frosting is supposed to cover up flaws, however if you don't really know what you're doing, it only exaggerates them.  Day 2 I left completely bummed. 

Day 3 arrived, and I was absolutely not excited.  That morning we didn't do anything with the cakes, just a bunch of prep and demonstrations from the instructor. It turned out to be a great morning....but then it was time to start decorating.....

Once it all came together, It wasn't completely horrible.  I really did enjoy it, and could see I was finally starting to improve a little....minus my handwriting.  Seriously if I can't make letters look good with a paper and pen, how in the world am I supposed to make them look good with icing?!??!  This one started out ok but somewhere in birthday, I apparently switched to Chinese.  :) 

AND THEN, WE MADE FLOWERS....AND I WAS GOOD AT IT!!!!!!!!!!  The light at the end of my tunnel.  Adam has his perfect shell borders.  Zia had his great shaped cakes.  I had my pretty flowers. :) The week picked up for me.  My borders and handwriting were always still a little lame, but I finally got the hang of building, frosting and decorating.  I was excited to keep practicing.  I didn't take pictures of all of them, but here's some more. 

My "Final"  The picture hid my cute sandy beach, complete with "sand"

Cake "Graduation" with my instructor, Norma.  I loved her!  She was so fun!

A good problem to have...there's so much ice cream, nothing else fits. :)

By the end of the week I could see how with lots more practice I would eventually be able to make cute enough cakes to sell, but was really really really glad we had great cake decorators already at our store. :)