Cake Decorating Class - Week 5

Tuesday gone was the latest cake decorating class. There was a lot more prep for this class than for any of the previous ones. We were making a Valentine's cake which was to look like a bouquet of roses. In preparation for the class we had to make a rectangular sponge cake and 12 red roses and on top of that we had to make some buttercream and bring along jam, white sugarpaste and green sugarpaste as well as our usual bits and bobs.

So on Sunday I made my rectangular cake using a roasting tin which was 23x33cm and I used the victoria sponge recipe provided by our teacher. Now I made the cake and it turned out fine but I was worried all day that it was too thin, bearing in mind it needed to be cut in half to put jam in it. But I decided to leave it, sure it would, probably, be ok. I then made 1 and a half the amount of buttercream (as I love buttercream). I then sat there for the next hour or so sculpting roses out of red sugarpaste (which I had painstakingly turned from white to red the previous day). I got better as I went along so decided to make 15 so i could pick the best 12 on the day.

The following day, Monday, I got a bit more panicky about the depth of the cake so I decided that I would make a second one that evening and put one on top of the other - however Monday was my book club night and we'd run out of eggs and margarine and then I remembered I needed more white sugarpaste so when I eventually got home, about 8:15pm, after a detour to the shops, I set straight to work and had it all done and dusted and cooling by 9pm - just in time for Glee.

I had a ton of stuff to take with me to the class - luckily it was able to stay in my car all day! The class started pretty much on time this week which was great and we set about transforming our pieces of sponge into something lovely. We firstly had to cut two of the corners off so that one end of the came almost came to a point - to give the shape of a bouquet. Then we had to put jam in the middle of the cakes (I hadn't realised that we wouldn't be using the buttercream for the middle of the cake - if I had, I'd have made more!) and we covered the whole top and sides of the cake in buttercream so that the sugarpaste would stick to the cake.

Our next step was to roll out enough sugarpaste to cover the cake. It was now I realised in fact how big my cake was. I have to say my skills do not lie in rolling out a rectangular piece of sugarpaste - it just turned into a blob - but not a big enough blob lol. I eventually got there after 3 attempts and had done just enough to cover it all. For this cake we didn't have to make all the edges smooth and perfect as this time we just tucked the icing underneath itself to create little folds, to make it look a bit like the cellophane surrounding a bouquet. At the front where the (almost) point was, we gathered the sugarpaste together to make it look like the bit of a bouquet you would be holding onto (if that makes sense).

The next step was to make the stems. We had to roll out quite thin sausages using green sugarpaste and then we used a knife to cut into the sausage to make it look like the thorns on a real rose stem. These were strategically placed on the main body of the cake and were stuck down using a small amount of water, and the stems all trailed off to the point of the cake. I had 10 stems on mine at varing lengths and I then added a few leaves at random points across the stems. The final step was to add the roses to the top of the stems, making it al look so very pretty :)

I added my own mini last step in which was to add a bit of edible glitter to the cake to make it sparkle!