Wilton Course 3: Flowers!

In the third week of Wilton Course 3 we learned 4 new royal icing flowers, all of which involved the lily nail set.  Unfortunately, I wasn't thrilled with the consistency of my royal icing.  I didn't want my tips to clog or my hands to break, so I made it a little on the thin side.  Since I was in class, I just had to deal with it...

We first learned the lily:

Here I think my white icing was a little stiff, but there was a tiny bit of green in the center that was too soft, which made it hard to keep the stamens where I wanted them.  But still, I think they're a very pretty flower.  The stamen are pre-purchased and not edible, though not toxic-- they're made from paper and royal icing. 

Next, we learned the poinsettia:

The photo quality isn't great, and a couple of my petals broke in transit, but you get the idea.  I don't think these really look like poinsettia, but whatever! :)

Next we learned the petunia:

I really like this flower, though I think it looks more like a hibiscus with the wrong stamen... I had to leave this one in the foil because it wasn't ready to be removed.  My icing was way too soft on this one and especially the next one, the morning glory:

You can see it kinda lost its shape because the icing was so soft.  And it shifted a little in transit, which is why it's lopsided.  Fortunately, if I ever make these for a cake, I'll be at home and can have more control over these factors.  :)

As a preview for what's coming this week, I've been working on fondant roses to go on my tiered cake that we'll make this Thursday.  These have been very time consuming-- I've probably worked on them for 10+ hrs to make about 40 roses... and they're still not done!  And not all are full sized!

Here are some full sized ones:

Mostly medium and some rosebuds:

And yet some more....

Just like a lot of stuff in the confectionery world, it's a lot of work!  I hope the cake comes out good...

Wilton Course 2- Adventures in Royal Icing

Last night was my 3rd (out of 4) class in the Wilton Course 2 series.

In classes 2 and 3, you learn some royal icing flower varieties and make a few in class.  Because royal icing dries hard, you save up the flowers (and make some more at home) and then bring the flowers you've made to the last class where you actually decorate a cake.

In addition to the flowers, we learned to make cake decorations using color flow icing.  The technique is the same as I described in my Buzz Cake (What's all the BUZZ about?).  The only difference is that color flow icing is intended to be shinier and less airy.  This is what I used to make the birds:

I made the birds using yellow and white color flow.  Then, even though it's not really part of the course, I decided to paint the birds using a cranberry luster dust.  I used a food color pen to draw the eyes, and diluted orange gel color to paint the beaks.  Yes, I'm an overachiever. :o)

Last week in class we did the violet, apple blossom, and violet leaf.

Sorry the picture is a little dark-- here you can see the violets and violet leaves.

 

Here are the apple blossoms.

In last night's class, we covered victorian roses, daffodils, primroses, pansies, and dasies-- it was a little hectic.

In this picture, you can see the victorian rose and the pansy:

The victorian rose is made with tip 97, which has some curvature, rather than petal tip 104.  I think I prefer the classic roses...  Regardless, I painted a few of the better ones to give them some extra color/ dimension.

The pansies are made with tip 104 and tip 1 for the little central loop.  Then, being the overachiever that I am, I looked on the internet and painted some realistic patterns on them:

The cylindrical thing they are sitting in is a flower former-- the course two kit comes with a variety of flower formers in a few sizes.  Drying the flowers in or on these gives them some curvature so that they are not totally flat.

Here are the daffodils:

The daffodil petals are made by pinching their ends with your fingers dipped in corn starch.  

Here are some daisies and primroses:

I've since painted some of the primroses too-- those will be a surprise for next week.

So, if you're a fan of The Cake Engineer on Facebook, you might have noticed that I was up late piping flowers after class these past two weeks...

... That's a lot of flowers.

Next week we use the flowers (I won't be using ALL of them...) and the birds, and decorate a small oval basket-weave cake.  So that's what I've been up to!

I'm also taking a beginning fondant class a week from Saturday.  Hoping to pick up some good pointers. :)

What's all the BUZZ about?

This is the cake I made for the Orange Bowl this year.  Apparently, I should have delivered it to our team for inspiration...

The great news about this cake is I took more pictures of the whole process  (which is something I'll also try to do in future posts), so you'll be able to see the construction from beginning to end!

For this cake, I knew I wanted to practice image transfer and putting Buzz, the Georgia Tech mascot, on the cake seemed like a great opportunity to do so. 

In thinking about the cake, I thought I'd make the inside color scheme match the outside.  I decided to do yellow cake with ganache filling-- very similar to the Yellow Jacket colors!

Let's start at the beginning.  I decided to try this yellow cake recipe: David's Yellow Cake

For the record, I used unsalted butter, and a low-protein all purpose flour rather than cake flour.  I probably should have made a proper substitution (you use a little less all purpose flour and a little corn starch) but we'll leave that for next time.

Look how LEVEL they are!!!  I was very excited.

So excited, in fact, that I forgot to wrap them up in a timely fashion because I was busy looking at them.  I think the cake got stale, but by the time I tried some it tasted pretty dry.  I remedied this by pouring on a capful of Kahlua when serving.  I will have to try this recipe again and see if it really is on the dry side or if I just used too much flour or let them sit out too long.

The next step was to create Buzz.  I found a picture of Buzz that I liked and re-sized it appropriately, then printed it.  I decided to try the image transfer by piping Buzz on parchment paper using royal icing, and then carefully removing him after the icing solidified.  I taped down the parchment paper over my printout, and got to it!  I did this using a damming and flooding approach: I piped the outline in a stiffer black icing, then filled in the colors with thinned out icing, using the outlines to contrain the flow.

Shiny.... :)

Now for the Cake Assembly Slide show!

Put your bottom layer on the cake board with a little buttercream to hold it in place.

Pipe a Dam in the color of the outside frosting.  Apply delicious filling-- this is ganache. 

Put on the top layer-- trim the edge if necessary.

Crumb coat!  Then put it in the fridge for a few so it crusts over.

While it's in the fridge, clean up the carnage.  I decided that in my blog, I'm gonna try to keep it real-- I make a MESS.  So if you do too... it's cool.  And if you don't, I'm jealous.  Tell me your secret!

Applying the second coat.  And smooth.  And smooth.  And smooth a little more.  Let crust a little.

Then, I took a Kleenex Viva paper towel (no texture) and gently smoothed out the remaining grooves.

Smooth....  I don't worry about the edge too much since I know I'll be piping a border.

Carefully remove Buzz from the parchment, and place on the cake using  a little buttercream.   It worked, but you can see his antennae broke.   No worries!  Just re-affix with a little leftover royal icing.

A parchment cone.  We have a love/hate relationship. 

More on this in the future, just wanted you to see one.  

You fill it with icing, and fold in the top.  Then you trim the tip to the appropriate size opening.

The finished product!

Top border:  Shells, Tip #18

Bottom border: Shells, Tip #32

Swags, Tip #18-- my first attempt at such!  In the future, I'll divide the cake more carefully, this time I just compensated with a little GT symbol.  

The polka dots are just thinned royal icing piped into a mound on a sil-pat.  Let them dry and just pop them off like little buttons!  Apply with some royal icing.

That's all folks!  

The Next Cake Adventure

Basket-weave Flowery Cake

This cake was my second adventure in cake decoration.  This adventure had 3 parts:

   1) Royal Icing Flowers

   2) Painting the Flowers

   3) Cake Assembly/ Piping/ Flower Application

This cake started because I wanted to try my hand at piping flowers.  For this experiment, I decided to use royal icing rather than buttercream.  While I believe many of these flowers could be created using buttercream, it can be finicky.  I'll dedicate a whole post to buttercream and royal icing in the future, but royal icing is great for piping detail work for a variety of reasons.  First, it's a simple recipe that can easily be whipped up in small batches (typically just egg white and powdered sugar, and maybe a touch of flavor extract) and it can be made very stiff or runny (by adding more or less powdered sugar).  It dries quickly when in contact with the air and dries hard like cement.  That means you can pipe onto parchment paper or wax paper, let your creations harden, and transfer them to your cake later with relative ease. Also, it won't break your jaw to eat it, and generally tastes sugary, like a heavier version of a meringue cookie.

Part I:

All of the flowers on my cake with the exception of the all over orange blossoms started off WHITE.  They were all piped using Wilton petal tips in royal icing on parchment squares on a flower nail.  It took some work to get the royal icing to the right consistency: at first it was too soft and the roses just kinda collapsed on themselves.  If you're using a hand mixer, it will feel like you're mixing cement.  Also, if you look in the bowl, see if and for how long the mix marks are retained after you turn off the mixer.  For piping flowers, you want the icing to retain those features and stay rough looking.  There are times you want it to be softer and self smoothing, but this is not one of them! The white blossoms were finished off with some orange royal icing dots using a  round tip, and the orange flowers were finished with a white buttercream center using a #18 star tip after they were placed on the cake.

Part II:

The flowers were painted individually using gel food colors diluted with some lemon extract.  Color dilution can also be done using vodka or vanilla extract-- anything with a high alcohol content. Painting can be done with any 'food-safe' paintbrushes, i.e. brushes you haven't actually used to paint.

Part III:

Once the flowers were all dried and painted (I gave them a full day to dry), I worked on assembling the cake.

The cake itself was made using the Classic Yellow Cake recipe from Sylvia Weinstock's Sweet Celebrations book.  This cake smelled AMAZING while it was baking.  It tasted pretty good too, but I think after smelling it for so long it wasn't as exciting as it might have been otherwise.

The buttercream is the Wilton recipe:   http://www.wilton.com/recipe/Buttercream-Icing

Something interesting to note is that not all shortening is created equal.  The first time I made buttercream, I purchased butter flavor Crisco, which is yellow colored!  The icing came out tasting good, but was more of an ivory color:

 

The cake in this picture was more an extension of my first cake-- a way to use up the remaining ganache (on the top), and a way to test out some home made buttercream.  You can see the ivory color due to the yellow crisco, but it still tasted good!

Beyond the butter flavor shortening, regular Crisco as well as certain store brands no longer contain trans fats.  For whatever reason, this affects the consistency of the frosting.  I found it was a little softer and less stable than I would have preferred.  In the south, Kroger's store brand shortening still contains trans fats, so I prefer to use that or a half and half mixture of no trans/ trans fat shortenings.

 Before I iced this cake, I made the decision to cover the cake round with aluminum foil to avoid the spreading of grease onto the cardboard.  I don't really recommend this unless you buy the heavier/ bigger foil that is sold (quite expensively) at your cake supply stores.  Since the foil had a seam (I needed to use two pieces) it was harder to ice on the turn table.  My spatula kept getting caught on the foil seam.

Anyway, I filled this cake with butter cream, did a crumb coat, and then did a second smoother layer.  For those who don't know, a crumb coat is a thin layer of buttercream that is applied to the cake and allowed to solidify. (I like to let it harden in the fridge for a few minutes).  This layer traps any crumbs that stray from the cake.  Then a second layer is applied more meticulously and smoothed to (near) perfection.  Or so I try. :)

On this cake, I really wanted to try a basketweave.  This technique can be done using a variety of different tip combinations, and instructions are readily available on Wilton's website:  Basketweave

I then piped a basic rope border on the bottom using tip #18:   Rope

(Note: this one I needed to practice on parchment a few times.  I think the secret is to not really pipe a full 'S', but it's one of those things you should try before you just start on the cake.)

The top is a shell border using the same tip #18: Shell

Then, I simply stuck on my pre-made royal icing flowers.  For some of them, I piped on more significant amounts of buttercream for them to rest on to make them stand up more or angle more or whatever.  After putting the flowers where I wanted, I filled in the foliage with a leaf tip (e.g. #67) and some vines with a round tip, using green colored buttercream.

The idea was that I wanted the flowers and vines to escape the confines of the basket, so I chose to put some of the flowers and vines on the side to achieve that effect.