Hello everybody! I hope you all had an excellent Halloween and ate as much candy as I did! This week we learned about sponge and buttercream cakes. Aside from our fruitcakes, this was the first time we got to decorate real cake and not styrofoam. We learnt the proper method of cutting, filling, icing and stalking the cakes. We also got to learn some new buttercream piping techniques, including swags, Swiss dots and buttercream roses. 

We baked three different kinds of cake, white cake, yellow cake and chocolate cake. They each had a different Swiss buttercream filling, which included vanilla, chocolate and caramel. All the cakes were then covered in Italian buttercream. My personal favourite was the white cake with vanilla buttercream.

This is my current partner Ruby, who was very excited to be decorating our first real cake!

We decorated the cake differently on each side in order to practice more piping techniques. This side was the more traditional side and the decorations included fleur de lis, swags and buttercream roses. 

I've attempted to do buttercream roses before but have never had much success. I still had trouble with these ones but managed to get a couple good looking ones. Luckily we had several hours to practice the piping techniques on dummy cakes before we had to do the real thing. 

This was the other side of the cake, which was a bit more modern and simple. It was definitely the easier of the two to decorate.

Well our first full week of baking was really fun! I love decorating cakes but I've missed the baking and filling part as I haven't done it in so long. I now have about three quarters of the cake left in my freezer waiting to be eaten by someone... and as this cake is large enough to serve around 50 people, it may be there for a while. So if anyone wants free cake come and visit me in Chicago! Next week we're doing chocolate decorations so I get to take home even more food! I can't wait to tell you all about it. Till next time.

Happy baking,

Kayla