Wilton Cake Decorating: Week #2

My 2nd Wilton Cake Decorating Class was this week and you (may have) read last week that I didn't really learn too much last week, but was hoping to learn a lot this week... well, I set my hopes a little high I guess.

It turns out our instructor doesn't exactly go along with the "Lesson Plan" from our book.
We get to class with our 8 inch un-iced cake and we get started icing the whole cake. She then shows us how to do Piping Gel Pattern Transfer (from lesson 1 in the book), which is absolutely brilliant! Seriously! I actually kind of hate to share this nifty little tidbit (not like it's a secret or anything though). This would have come in handy for the Minnie Mouse cake for Charlotte's 2nd birthday party. The general idea is you print out your pattern, place parchment paper on top, trace the lines using Piping Gel, flip over onto an iced cake and brush over your lines to transfer them. Once you remove the parchment paper, your pattern is on the cake. Voila. Simple. Genius.

We skip the lessons on "Bag Position", "Pressure Control", "Curving Line and Tight Zigzag", and "Dimensional Decorating" and go straight to coloring icing with 'Wilton Icing Color' -- which I know how to do.

Our instructor does come around to each person and show us how to do the specific design and which tip to use. So she came to me for the top of my cupcake design (pictured below) and showed me how to do it and told me to practice on my practice board. That was it. I was done with my decorating rather quickly, so I embellished with some dots on the top, and around the edges of the cake.

Since I was done rather quickly, I decided to go ahead and practice my "Curving Line and Tight Zigzag" since I wasn't entirely sure when we'd do them. I ask my instructor if this was ok and she said 'sure, you'll just have more practice than everyone else'.... so I guess that means we are doing it in Week 3?

By the way, here was my mother-in-laws cake; she likes to "play" versus being precise.

And here is my cake (after the drive home) to sort of show you the dimension of the cupcake:

I know I say that I'm not really "learning" much... but I AM getting 2 hours free to play without the kids... so you can't beat that!!

Next week we are decorating cupcakes with Drop Flowers, Shell borders, Pompom flowers, leaves, shaggy mums, plus learning to fill and ice a cupcake. Looks fun!

Other posts in this series:
Week 1
Week 3
Week 4

Don't forget to enter my 100 followers giveaway! They have some awesome stuff!! It's easy, only 2 mandatory entires :)

Linking up: Nifty Thrifty Things, Little Lucy Lu, CRAFT, Sarahndipities, Run with Glitter, Blackberry Vine, Sew Much Ado, Sweet Peas and Bumblebees, Gluesticks, Fingerprints on the Fridge