Wilton Class 2 - Icing Fiasco

I had my second Wilton class on Tuesday. We were supposed to bake a one layer (one cake pan) cake to take to class. I bought a Duncan Hines cake mix because they were on sale (I don't have time to bake from scratch AND make icing on a work night!). I have to say, I don't think I'll be using that again! I'll probably stick to Pilsbury from now on. The box instructions said to mix the batter for 4 minutes. I thought that sounded unusually long, but I did as I was told. The batter ended up thick, more like a bread dough than cake batter. It also rose a lot more in the middle, giving me a big dome shape. Luckily, I bought a cake leveler tool to deal with that. (But the cake did at least taste good.)

After baking the cake, I moved on to making the 2 batches of icing for class - 1 thin and 1 medium. I started with the thin. The class icing recipe is a little different than I'm used to, but I've made icing quite a few times, so I figured I wouldn't have any problems with it. I was WRONG!! The class recipe calls for 1 cup of Crisco. I usually use 1/2 cup of Crisco and 1/2 cup of butter. My instructor said that this would be fine and would give the icing a better taste. She said to just be sure and use real butter instead of margarine (which is what I have been using.) So I thought I'd give the butter a try and used a stick of Publix brand real cream butter. The thin icing came out very oily. I'm still not sure why. At first I thought it was becuase I'd forgotten the meringue powder, so I mixed that in, but it didn't help. Maybe it was the butter that I've never used before, maybe it was because I softened the butter 10 seconds in the microwave, who knows... Not being very experienced with thin icing, I figured maybe that's how it was supposed to be. I moved on to make the medium with no problems. I didn't have any more real butter, so I used the 1 cup of Crisco for the medium, and it seemed to turn out just fine.

In class, we began by leveling and torting our cakes. Even though I had never done it before, I found this process to be relatively easy. So glad I bought the cake leveler! I made a dam with my thin icing and used 2 chocolate pudding cups for the filling. My instructor had recommended pudding as a filling, and I thought I'd try the chocolate to be a little different. It did give the cake a good taste, but next time I think I'd thicken it with a bit of icing to have a better consistency when eating the cake.

Then it was time to ice the cakes. My instructor had recommended that we buy Wilton's cake icer tip, but my budget had to cave somewhere, and I figured I would try this class without it. The next time I ice a cake, I will have it though!! I was able to spread my icing very nicely on the top with no crumbs, and my instructor even said that it looked really pretty. The cheap turntable I bought really helped. Then it came to icing the sides, and disaster set in. My oily icing wouldn't stick to the sides of my cake - it kept falling off! No matter how much extra powdered sugar I tried mixing in, I couldn't get it to thicken up. I played with it for about 10 minutes and was getting very frustrated. My instructor could tell I was having trouble at this point. She removed all the icing from my cake, mixed it with my medium icing (which she said looked correct), and re-iced the cake for me. Plus, I'd played with the icing so much by this point that there were crumbs all in it. I felt completely defeated.

Despite losing the icing battle, I moved on to decorate my cake. We learned how to transfer a pattern using piping gel and fill it in with icing. I think it's a bit ironic that the design we used in class was a cupcake, since I enjoy baking cupcakes so much. My cupcake design turned out beautiful, and I hastily added a few sloppy borders around the edge of my poor cake before class was over.

The icing decorations got a little beat up in the car, but everyone at work the next day thought the cake was cute and tasted really good. But I'm hoping for a better experience next time.