Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Wilton Course 1, Class 2

Since I am currently painfully unemployed I decided to make the cake for my 3rd Wilton class a Valentine’s Day present for the fiancé. If he could eat one food for the rest of his life, it would either be steak, or peanut butter. Since I’ve never really considered making a steak flavored dessert, I went the peanut butter/chocolate route.

I started out with a chocolate fudge chocolate chip boxed cake. When you’re making a triple layer cake every week for a month and baking at school, Betty Crocker becomes your best friend. Even my pastry teacher tells us; if you’re baking for your family, and you don’t want to put in a huge amount of effort, use a boxed cake, and then make your own frosting. Boxed cakes taste fine, no one will even really know or care that it wasn’t homemade, but the frosting will knock your socks off.

Anyway, I wanted to make something a little different for Chris, since this was going to be a gift, so instead of going with the typical peanut butter and chocolate combination, I went with nutella. Mmm hazelnut and chocolate...such a delicious combination. I’m not going to lie, I’ve been smearing a little of it on my toast in the morning a few times a week. (I checked the labels; it has less calories and fat than peanut butter! So I win!) I put a nice helping of nutella in between the layers and then stirred quite a bit of it and a few dashes of cocoa powder into a batch of butter cream icing.

I spent a good amount of time frosting the outside of the cake, doing my best to make a smooth clean surface. It is definitely not as easy as it looks. Chocolate cake seems to be more prone to crumbling than other cake flavors. Even after letting my crumb coat sit in the refrigerator for a little while, it still wasn’t perfect. I used the trick my Wilton teacher taught us and took some wax paper and my fondant smoother, and rubbed lightly in circular motions until I got a smoother layer. It worked pretty well, but I think with a bit more practice I could really get the perfect surface.The class was dedicated to making a rainbow out of frosting stars. While I understood why it was helpful to learn the technique of that, I decided to do something nicer and more romantic-y. I borrowed a few heart cookie cutters from my classmate, outlined them and then filled in the heart shapes with the stars that I had learned earlier that day. Then I piped “Happy V-Day” on the cake because that’s all that would fit, but it came out pretty good anyway. I was really happy with how I performed at class that day. The stars and the script came very easily to me and I performed well without needing much teaching or correction. Thank God! I was surprised and relieved to learn that I was pretty naturally good at this, a huge load off my shoulders. It was tough having this huge dream I wanted to go after without even knowing if I was going to be capable of pulling it off or not.











I'm catching up on posts, so there will be many more to come,

Julibean <3

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