Wilton Cake Decorating Basics Course

Not that long in the distant past, one of my closest friends talked and talked about how she would love to make and decorate cakes. She is pretty artistic and quiet creative. So when a couple of years later she told me that she had been making cakes and showed me some pictures of them, I was hooked. But the icing on the cake was the beautiful cake that she made for my son, Jr. Puff for his 3rd birthday party.

What a fantastic cake!

All I could think about for months was how I wanted to do this as well. How I wanted to be able to make my children the greatest cakes for their parties. Even though I haven't had much experience at all, I do enjoy baking. So about a month ago, I decide to pursue the cake making dream. I did some research and learned that our local Michael's Craft store was starting Wilton cake decorating courses in September.

I quickly went to Michael's, picked up the September calender and signed up for the Cake Decorating Basics Course.

What is great about the Wilton courses is that you can have no experience at all.  They offer 3 courses that you can take: Decorating Basics, Gum Paste and Fondant and Flowers and Cake Design. They do suggest that you start with the Decorating Basics course.  For more information on this courses, please click here.

Each course consists of 4 weekly classes that are 2 hours in length.

The nice thing about the class schedule was that there were plenty of options for people like me that work during the day. I was able to sign up for the Friday 4 - 6pm course.  They were also having a 50% off September classes promotion, so I only paid roughly about 25$ for the course it self.  You may be sitting there thinking, that is fantastic, BUT the class itself is pretty pricey. You have to buy all sorts of supplies and tools and before you know it, you have spent about $300. Don't let that discourage you though, because once you buy these things (ie: cake stand, rolling pin, spatulas, etc, etc, etc.) You pretty much have them for life. So its a cost that over the long term really works out to not much if you are serious about cake making and decorating. A good thing to note is that Michael's constantly has 40 to 50% percent one item coupons that they give away weekly if you register to their website and receive their coupons. That really helps.

I really wanted to do this, but I thought it would be better if I did it with someone else. So I recruited my sister in law successfully.

Our first class was last Friday. Off we went with our Ultimate Decorating Set (all the tools needed for all 3 classes, sold in one big Wilton caddy), as well as the 6 home made cookies that the course syllabus instructed us to bring to the first class.

We started the class with introductions. The instructor then proceed to give us a general overview of the course and Wilton products.

She then thought us how to make homemade icing and told us that our homework for the week would be to make icing to bring to the next class. You might be thinking, that's no big deal, but as someone who has never made homemade icing before, I needed to make 3 batches of it. In thick, medium and thin consistency. I still have not made it, I will do that tonight or tomorrow and let you know how it goes.

Once she made the icing, she showed us how to ice a cake. She then told us that we were required to bake an 8 inch cake and bring that to the next ckass as well.

Once she showed us how to do these things, she made us open up our big caddy and pull out our star icing tip. She showed us how to fill the bag with icing.

We then pulled out our cookies and learned how to use the star tip. Here are some of my pictures:

Getting our tools out ready to decorate our cookies.

My first attempt at decorating the cookie with the star tip. Not too bad if you ask me!

All four of the cookies I decorated to take home to the kids.

And that was it for the first class.

Either later today or tomorrow I will be making the icing and the cake. I will continue to take pictures of my baking journey and continue to blog about it and the classes.

For more information on Wilton and the products and classes they offer, please go to http://www.wilton.com/ 

Im really excited for Fridays class. I cannot wait to share it with you.