I have always loved frosting on cakes…give me the big flower with lots of edging! I had a Wilton cake decorating set years ago. A busy life and easy access to great Carl’s Cakes was little incentive to learn the craft of cake decorating. BUT, I have been plotting learning this skill with, you guessed it, Youtube videos.

I have the color combo’s learned from my years of paper crafting to guide me. Placement of focal points surrounded by smaller details and various texture lessons already give me a good foundation of skills. Now, it’s just baking the cakes, mixing the frostings and testing out my squeezing skills to make the fluffy, frosting flowers.

Here is my first attempt decorating a vanilla cake recipe from a Better Homes and Gardens cook book copyright 1981. The serving size on this cake is 12 servings. You can see I had fun using all the tips in my starter Wilton tip set. I realized after posting this blog entry that this cake features trendy colors, Just Jade, Misty Moonlight, Pale Papaya, Cajun Craze and Very Vanilla!

under the cake dome always looks better…frosting was butter, powdered sugar, milk

My next cake was a chocolate mocha cake. Cake recipe is from Ina Garten here. The frosting is heavy whipping cream with 2 packets of instant Sanka. The frosting was piped to look like a tree trunk slice on top with bark along the cake sides.

The pumpkins were piped using leftover over frosting from the first cake. Stems were plain coffee beans while the center circle had almond bark coated coffee beans. Leaves were molded using assorted tree leaves and almond bark. Definitely make this cake again. The mocha frosting is actually one we use to top chocolate chip cookies for tea.

For the next cake, I was trying to recreate Mom’s favorite Carl Cake’s flavor, apricot hazelnut. Instead of apricot, raspberry extract was used in the cake and frosting. The cake is again from Ina and is the Birthday Cake recipe here. I would split this recipe into 3, 8-9 inch circle pans the next time since it took way longer to bake and almost overflowed the pans I used.

The chocolate glaze is Aldi’s Berryhill chocolate hazelnut spread. Raspberry jam was the filling. The frosting was butter, Crisco shortening, powdered sugar and raspberry extract so it’s shelf stable. Flowers are from molds with melted chocolate chips. A tiny bit of yellow tinted frosting makes the pollen flower centers. I was trying for a succulent theme but the Pampered Chef Easy Accent Decorating tool did not have the right tips. So settled for the stars and shell border instead.

It was a fun experiment with different types of cakes, frosting and shaping tools. I decided that coupling frosting bags are on my shopping list along with those tips to create the succulents, roses and leaves. Never thought a flower nail would be on my list, but there ya go. Next up when I have some free time will be cupcakes so stay tuned!

Super Awesome Cake Decorator Shirley