Despite a rather nasty bronchitis/sinusitis illness this week I made it to the final class of the 3 part Silwood Cake Decorating Course Part 1. I was really looking forward to showing off my flowers that I had done for homework and putting them onto a completed cake.

Thankfully, the Silwood students baked the cakes and made the butter-cream icing for us. We began by icing our cakes with butter-cream icing… now I really like butter-cream icing and we had been given more than we needed…suffice it to say, I had about one sixth of the tub left and other class members had at least half of their tubs left. Hehe:)

This came back to bite me when we placed our plastic icing on top, because my cake was decidedly more squishy than it should have been so smoothing the plastic icing out was no easy task….lesson learnt…I had to do it again with a great deal of help from the teacher, but I got to keep my thick layer of butter-cream icing. Lovely!

After the plastic icing we placed a ribbon around the base, pinned it in place and started to pipe our border using Royal Icing and the technique that we learnt in the first lesson. Thankfully I had practised this on a some cupcakes earlier yesterday afternoon, because this was fairly tricky. See my practising:

My icing skills are definitely improving!

So the piping began and we went slowly around the cake trying to end off as neatly as possible. Now for the really difficult part…how to place the flowers. I have now problem sticking them onto designated areas, but if you leave it up to me you will usually end up with a very symmetrical and exact pattern. So I challenged myself to do something out of my comfort zone and go for something slightly more decorative and fun.

The finished product….

The flowers going down the side were my teachers idea and I really like them. I’m really happy with the outcome. Now comes the eating….problem.

You can’t cut this kind of cake just because. You need to have a reason for it, so umming and ahhing about what to do with it and it struck…my parents-in-law are celebrating the 35th wedding anniversary tomorrow. Now, that’s worth celebrating. Yay, a purpose for my cake!

Now to focus on getting better so that I can get back into the kitchen!