Grandma To The Rescue

As any mother of small ones knows, it’s always nice to have help when you can get it. My hubby is traveling next week and as fate would have it my mother was available to fly out and stay with the girls and I. Yeah!! We haven’t seen her since Christmas so this will be a fun week for everyone.

While Grandma is here there are three things on the agenda:

1. Date Night with the hubby before he takes off for his business trip (we don’t get many of these so we definitely take advantage when grandmas are here!)
2. Lots of Grandma Shell hugs and kisses!
3. Cookie practice!!!

Now I better go make a list of cookies to bake and how to decorate them…otherwise I may not get anything done with this “open” sketch book 🙂

Making a Garden

I have to be honest here (I mean I’m writing on the internet so what else could I possibly be??)…I’m loving making flowers. I wasn’t sure I would since I’m more of a cookie gal, but after the last three cake decorating classes I’m seeing how fun other treats can be. The words that come to mind when I look at these flowers are classy, beautiful, elegant, realistic (ok that’s a stretch I even know it), and maybe most appropriate…royal 😉

Here are the flowers I made last night. Now I just need to decide which ones make the cut and get used for my final cake design next week 🙂 All I gotta say is they better put their game face on before judging!

Lillies

Daffodils

Violets

And of course more roses!

Rose-a-licious

My amazing hubby sent me flowers for Valentine’s Day. They are on my kitchen counter smelling wonderful and making me smile every time I see them. While yesterday was a tough day for me, today things are looking up! I got both girls down for their afternoon naps and I even got a shower in before noon!! I know, GO ME! I came downstairs after my shower and saw my beautiful bouquet of flowers. I immediately knew what I needed to do.

I popped a waffle in the toaster and started filling up a piping bag (yes…waffle first…a woman does have her priorities after all). I decided to practice my Wilton roses. I hardly had any icing left over from Monday’s class, but enough to make 4 roses. So, as Jack Johnson sang sweet love songs to me I piped away! Definitely better before the icing gets too warm from your hand but I think I did pretty good 🙂

Petal Power

Monday nights…Bachelor and cake decorating class. Oh and a glass of wine, after class of course! I suggest this for anyone who gets the Monday blues…sure makes my Mondays super!

Last night we learned to make flowers using royal icing. Very different than the royal icing I use for cookies. Used the Wilton recipe which, seemed very airy but made pretty flowers. I’m thinking in the future I’ll add some cornstarch to thicken up the icing before piping any flowers. Learned this tip when my roses were having impotence issues 😉

For color inspiration, I used the beautiful flowers a good friend sent me as a thank you for making her baby shower favors. I was going for a light pink and a nice girlie pink but wound up with a purpleish pink and a hot pink. Guess the teacher was right…colors will brighten up when left over night! Need to take this into consideration next time I make up icing!

We learned the Wilton Rose, apple blossoms and the primrose. I’m picturing some of these on my final cake 🙂

Wilton Rose

Primrose

Apple Blossoms

 

My First Fan Mail

Well lookie here…look what surprised me at my front door this afternoon!!

My first cake decorating book (if you don’t count the ones I nabbed from my Mom that she used back in the day). And one from my wish list!

So exciting! You can see my oldest daughter thinks it’s fabulous too and wants to get her little paws on it. What’s even more exciting…I don’t know who it’s from! No invoice. No card. No indication who it’s from.

So…I put my slueth hat on and have deduced that I only have 3 followers, 1 of which is me 😉 so that leaves my amazing Mom and Dad. Hmmm…wonder if they conspired together to gift me with this surprise.

I think I owe the two of them a phone call to confirm 🙂

Roses Roses Roses

Getting stuff put together for my last class of the basic cake decorating class I’m taking. Kinda sad, but excited to take the next class “Wilton Flowers and Cake Design” which starts in February.

For our last class we need to bring a bunch of flowers to decorate the cake with (in addition we’ll be learning to make roses in class!) so I piped up some more rosettes. The red ones I made the other night tasted horrible, so pink was the color of the day! Hopefully they set up and travel well tomorrow.

I don’t know why I care so much what these practice cakes taste like…my hubby and I have 1 slice each after class and then throw the rest of the cake away. Guess I still want that one piece to taste like heaven 😉

Red Rosettes

Decided to whip up some frosting tonight and give my rosettes a practice. For our fourth and final session of this cake class, I need to bring a fully frosted cake to class with some pre-made flowers to use for decorating. I rocked the rosettes last week so I thought I’d make some more for the cake. That was the plan. I thought I’d make a white cake with red roses along with red and pink rosettes. That was the plan. Figured I’d make some of the rosettes tonight. That was the…yes…the plan. However, the frosting I tinted red turned out some really funky orangish color. Kinda looked like sock eye salmon. Not pretty. Tasted a little funky too. To be honest it was AWEFUL! I had put soooo much coloring into the frosting that it changed the flavoring. How the hell are you supposed to make red frosting? Must look that up. Anyway, practice was good. First half turned out nice. Second half the frosting was too warm from my hand so it wasn’t as nice. Won’t be saving any of the rosettes for class, but it was still fun to play around 🙂

Lessons Learned:

• Figure out how to color frosting red
• If you’re going to be man-handling your piping bag a bunch, only fill it half way so that the frosting doesn’t get too warm