New Techniques

I discovered Craftsy a little while ago and have taken several of their cake decorating classes. All of them have been wonderful, but I think the one I just finished is one of my favorites. It helped answer a lot of my fondant bulging questions.

If you are interested at all in cake decorating, and especially covering your cakes with fondant, check out the Clean & Simple Cake Design class. It is great! I made this cake using the techniques from this class, and guess what? There's no ganache under that fondant! It's all buttercream.

Oh yeah! No buckling, no sagging. I am one happy decorator today. :o)

Jessica's class is all about clean and simple lines and she shows you how to get this awesome vertical stripe on your cake with minimal effort. I like her wax paper transfer technique, but by far, learning the secrets of straight sides was the best thing I took from this class.

I learned that my issues were not with my home made marshmallow fondant, (that's what she uses and teaches you how to make), but in the techniques. Yes, you DO need to refrigerate a buttercream cake, and yes it DOES need to be in the fridge until a couple hours before serving. I kept this in the fridge until Sunday morning and took it to church. It sat at room temp for almost 4 hours before our Fellowship Supper. No bulges, no sagging, and no condensation issues. It was yummy too. ;o)

Jessica also teaches how to make modeling chocolate since that is what she uses for those awesome stripes. I've used it a lot in the past, but never really realized how nice it is, for stripes especially. It doesn't stretch when you're cutting it out and it doesn't dry out super fast like fondant and gumpaste, so you have time to work with it.

I decided to try my hand at daffodils and since they were going on cupcakes, I wanted them completely edible and yummy, so I used the modeling chocolate from the cake. I have a very old Wilton gumpaste flower set that happened to have daffodil cutters in it. It worked great. Normally, daffodils would have stamens in the middle, but I have no idea how to make edible stamens and didn't want to go ripping them out of everyone's cupcakes before they ate them, so these flowers are stamen-less.I'm sure no one even realized that but me.

Oh, almost forgot to mention, if you click on the class name above, it will take you to a promotion page where Jessica's class is 50% off! Wish I'd had that when I signed up, but it was still worth every penny I paid. Besides all the great info in the videos, I was able to post questions, and Jessica was super quick at answering them for me.

Well, I'm off to get some more projects done.

Till next time...
God's love and blessings!