String Work Cake

Happy Sunday! It's a very happy one for us since our grandson arrived on Thursday! We have been enjoying his company since!

Today's cake is a demo cake. I had been taking a Master Decorators class. I wanted to work on detail work which included different piping techniques as well as sugar flowers. Over the next few months you will see examples of the new flowers I learned how to make but this week you get to see the piping techniques. I was required to show 7 different techniques in this one cake for my final "exam". For this cake I used bridge work, string work, line work, coronets, ruffling, sugar flowers and shell work. That's a lot of different looks to try to put into one cake and we had to come up with our own design, not copy from the teachers work.

I have to say this is the hardest bit of piping work I have ever had to do on a cake. The instructor warned us that for every 1 string we got to string properly we would end up wiping 3 away. I had no idea that was an understatement! It took me two hours to do the string work alone! The fun new technique that I learned was the ruffling. I've done a form of ruffles before but this is such a more realistic, not to mention easier, version of what I've done in the past!

Now you are probably wondering why I bring up my classwork here in the blog. For one thing it was something that took me 3 months to learn and a whole lot of work and I wanted to show you all that I'm still learning. No matter how much I think I know about decorating, there is still more to learn and it's fun to discover new things to do with sugar and icing. But the other reason is to encourage others here that may be reading this to go out and explore the classes in your area. Michaels has several levels of classwork and many cake supply shops also offer them. Lastly, check online to see if you can find one that works for your interests. If you still can't find something that works for you then please do explore YouTube. Yup, you'd be amazed at how much I've learned thanks to that website! Tons of videos that you can play over and over again till you get the technique down and all for free! Can't beat that.

More cakes to come over the next weeks. Next week I'll share with you a baby shower cake I delivered just this afternoon!

Cat