'Tis The Season!

Christmas is my favorite time of the year! Cookies, and cake, and food all around! We had an office party so I made about 70 mini vanilla cupcakes, adorned them with the 1M swirl and covered them with Nerds candy, sprinkles, colored sugar, Smarties, and Christmas quins.

Things have been a little slow after my last cake class. After 4 weeks of baking cakes and mixing buttercream, it's been a nice break. There aren't any December cake classes but I'm hoping in January to continue with other courses and learn more techniques.

The last couple of days has been busy with a lot of cooking and baking..making gingerbread cookies are a must and very relaxing to me!

Wish you and your families a very Merry Christmas!

Graduation Day

So this was the final cake class..we were left alone to decorate our own cakes! We had to bring in a 8" pre-iced cake that was 3" high, as well as any pre-colored icing. We learned how to pipe roses, so I decided to use those and make a cake. We also had to write something so I decided to get into the Christmas spirit a bit early. At the end, we got our Wilton certificates! I should mention our Wilton instructor was Antonella Santello...she's great!

Niv's Birthday

I used my new-found drop flower skills to make a birthday cake (layered chocolate cake) for another coworker! I thought I'd practice on my own how to make buttercream ribbon roses...this is what we're going to learn next week. It didn't turn out as full as i'd have liked, but it's a work in progress! I made drop flowers a few days ago and left them to dry/harden. I knew some would break so I made extras...good thing too!

Shaggy Mums!

Lesson 3 - how to decorate cupcakes! We were taught how to make drop flowers (the yellow cupcake is covered in them), rosettes, pompom flowers (the light blue cupcake), 1M swirl (white cupcake), shaggy mums (dark blue cupcakes), leaves, and how to fill a cupcake! The shaggy mums looks a bit messy .. sort of like a mop of hair. But I really liked the drop flowers.

Lesson 2

This is the cake I prepared at the second cake class. We were to bring in two halves of a cake, and learned how to tort (level it), fill, layer, and top off with buttercream. We then transferred a pattern onto the top and filled those in. I decided to go with a fish pattern, whereas everyone else followed the book and went with the cupcake pattern. The colors turned out lighter than I would have liked..this just made it look like a baby shower cake.

Pastels

I made Oreo Cupcakes again - this time with light pink and green buttercream icing -- I wanted to practice making buttercream icing, the Wilton way.
I also experimented with the 2D tip that came in the Decorating Basics kit. I think I like the 2D swirl (the pink cupcakes) better than the 1M swirl.

The Wilton Method

I've been hearing a lot of that lately! I've decided to sign up for cake decorating classes at Michaels' Craft Store. My goal is to improve my piping skills and to get new ideas. The first class was today - we were to bring in cookies and ready-to-use Wilton buttercream along with our Decorating Basics kit..these were the cookies I piped. We didn't have much time...a lot of today's class was "how to make your own buttercream icing - the Wilton way", and how to make different consistencies of icing.

Happy Halloween!

So i'm sort of baked out this week! I made sugar cookies for my coworkers, mini-cupcakes for a Halloween office party, and cupcakes for our workplace bakesale where all proceeds went to United Way.

The cookies went fast which was good to see! I made them the same way as before.

This was my first time making mini cupcakes. I used the 1M tip to make swirls and added sprinkles on top.

The charity cupcakes were chocolate with purple icing. This time I used a mix of blue and red, but they came out a grey-ish color which wasn't so bad considering the theme. I topped these with the 1M swirl, sprinkles, and gummies (green witches and orange pumpkins). These sold out pretty quickly too which I was happy to hear. Always willing to lend a hand for a good cause :)

Happy Halloween everyone!

Oreo Cupcakes

I wanted to try something new today! I crushed up about 12 oreo cookies and put them into my regular cake batter. I then placed half an Oreo cookie (icing side up) into each baking cup before pouring the batter in. I also wanted to try my hand at making my own creamcheese icing (which turned out great) but was a little too sweet with the Oreo cupcake. The Oreo at the bottom moulded with the cupcake and was really soft.

One thing I would change -- I would add the Oreo bits to the top of the batter AFTER you pour it into the baking cups. This way, the bits don't sink to the bottom. And i'll keep the creamcheese icing to the carrot muffins :)

Spooky Cookies!

Who doesn't like sugar cookies?? I decided to make some this weekend to get into the Halloween mood, and test out some stencils I bought from the local bulk food store. I used white whipped buttercream, smoothed it out with an angled spatula, placed the stencil carefully over it (don't press too hard, because when you pull it off, some buttercream icing will come off with it) and sprinkled colored sugar into the openings. These were soft and delicious! I think i'll make them again next week and take them to work!

A Great Birthday

It was my birthday yesterday and my great coworkers gave me a basket of cake supplies! There were things like cakeboards, Wilton tips, gumpaste power, cakepans, containers to store quins, spatulas, and fondant cutters!! I honestly can't wait to use all these things...it'll let me experiment with different tools. This was the best birthday ever!! I will post pictures soon.

Playing With Fondant

After seeing the cake made for my mom's birthday, I thought I'd try my hand at fondant. I bought a box of Wilton's neon-colored fondant (pink, yellow, purple, and red) and decided to cover a cake with some cutters I recently bought from Michaels. The first mishal was that I didn't have enough red fondant to cover the cake. The second was realizing I shouldn't have used that much buttercream, and not putting it in the fridge to atleast harden before laying on the fondant! It was a learning experience, and I have to say, cutting and layering those multicolored daisies was fun! It reminded me of Playdoh..good times. Hopefully the next fondant experience will be better, but for now I think i'll stick to getting buttercream right!

"You'll never know everything about anything, especially something you love."
— Julia Child
I can still try!

Surprise!!

Yesterday was my mom's birthday but we made her think we were not doing anything special for her 60th. Today we held a surprise party for her and after watching Cake Boss so much I decided I wanted to get her a fondant-covered cake instead of the traditional grocery store kinds. She was beyond surprised that we had done this -- it was about 3 months in the making. I went and got this cake from a local baker who had her own store, and told her exactly how I wanted it to look..and she did a good job in my opinion! It didn't taste as great as it looked so my new goal is to learn to how to make great looking cakes AND great tasting cakes!

Steph's Birthday

I made this cake for a coworker..I had played around a little bit with buttercream icing but had never really put any piping details into any of the cakes I've made. This was a layered chocolate cake with buttercream filing and icing. Her favorite colors were purple and green. I used food coloring from the grocery store..I was having a bit of trouble getting the right shade of purple. I didn't want to add a lot of food coloring so I just stopped there. I don't have a good Wilton spatula so I had used a butter knife dipped in warm water to smooth out the buttercream.

Welcome!

Hi everyone,

This is my first blog post on How Sweet It Is! I've been working on this blog for a while, trying to figure out how things work, etc. I'm new to cake-decorating...I love watching cake shows and everything just looks so great and yummy. A few years ago, I started to make cupcakes and muffins and cakes and got an interest for learning new recipes, especially ones pased down from my grandmother. Right now, I'm just sort of experimenting on my own and trying new things. So i'll post some pictures of the things i've created. If you have any tips or ideas, please let me know. Thanks!