Decorating cakes

Earlier this year I took a cake decorating class.  It was really fun.  Besides the teacher there were 2 other ladies in the class, for a total of 3 students.
What I realized is that I like to decorate cakes but I do not like being sticky.  Let me tell you that your hands will be sticky.  It annoys me.  So whenever I decorate a cake I have to always have a wet rag by me to wipe my hands with.
Since I have found a new hobby, we will no longer buy store bought cake, not even Ice Cream cake (yes! I learned how to make these also, on my own though.  Not in the class)

Here are some of the cakes I've made this year.  There are not many but hopefully there will be lots more to come.

Theses pictures are of the first cake I ever decorated.  It was the final cake for the class.  Since it fell around my MIL birthday we decided to give it to her.  Of course my dh tells me to write Happy Birthday on it AFTER I placed all the roses on the cake.  What does he think that  I'm an expert.... It's my first cake.

 The class also teaches you how to fill and decorate cupcakes.  These were fun to make.

 This cake was for my dd who turned 3.  She loves Dora and asked for a Dora cake.  Her hair needed to be a dark brown.  Yes Dora has dark brown hair not black hair.  For some reason the brown would not darken on me.  Lesson learned, next time I will just buy the dark brown icing coloring.

 My son wanted to decorate his own cake.  So I let him

 This cake was for my dd who turned 5.  She wanted a Princess Castle cake.  The idea for this cake came from one of my cake decorating books.  I couldn't find the right cake pan size so I had to use a spring foam pan.  The problem with the spring foam pan was that the sides were not tall enough for this cake.  It was supposed to have windows on the side.  We used Easter M&M's to decorate around the cake.  I should have wrote her name with a toothpick first to help me out but noooo this time I thought I was the expert and tried to eyeball the placement of her name.  You live and learn

 Here is my Birthday cake.

 My dd Ice Cream Cake.  These are so easy to make.  I will be posting a tutorial on how to make your own Ice Cream cake.

 Father's Day cake.  My dh is a HUGE Yankees fan.  So for Father's Day I decided to make him a Yankees cake.  Why does it seem that when I plan something, something ALWAYS goes wrong.  Is it just me or does this happen to you too.  So, I end up running out of icing. Now you're probably thinking that that's not a big deal, OH but it is.  The icing used to decorate cake is not the same as the store bought ones ( Betty Crocker, Dunkin Hines etc..) These icings are too soft for decorating purposes.  If you just want to frost a cake and write Happy Birthday on it, then these will do, but to actually but a design on the cake they are to creamy.  I should have just made the icing but nooo, I thought I could do it with store bought icing not realizing that ITS TOO CREAMY. 
My son saved the cake.  He is very good at drawing free hand.  I showed him a yankee logo and he drew it on the cake with a toothpick, then I went over it with the icing.  Cake saved and dh loved it.
What I learned is to always have plenty of icing on hand.  So for now on I will be buying the big tubs of wilton icing.


                                                  I will never run out of icing again!