I'm becoming so domestic these days.
Times were, many moons ago, that I was a young independent woman who worked a simple little job and lived alone in her own house, and rarely touched a pot or pan. In fact, my friends from 'once upon a time' used to complain when they came over and tried to raid the 'fridge only to find no real food to speak of. I had been accused of having a 'bachelor's refrigerator' and I'd heard many refrains of: 'you have every condiment known to human kind in here but no food. That's messed-up!" (One of my co-workers, if she reads this, is going to throw up at that particular phrase--sorry! Just tellin' it like it is)
These days, I often cook. In fact, some months I cook nearly every night except "left-overs" night. Don't get confused, I still have those weeks where I still have every condiment known to human kind and no food, and well, we simply go out to eat. Yes. It is expensive, wasteful, and causes my waistline to creep further and further out latitudinally. However, for the most part, I cook. Healthy-ish meals, from scratch. I hate boxed 'convenience' food--it all tastes the same to me (bad) and let's face it, anything with a 3 year shelf-life shouldn't go into our bodies (note: I conveniently forget this piece of rhetoric as I order our dinner at the golden arches.)
So, along the lines of my newly donned domesticity, I have decided to take a cake decorating class with my friend, J. J. and I go out for walks on average of 2x a week. We're getting in shape--something other than round, preferably. And on one of our walks J. asked me if I'd be interested. Sure. Why not? Sounds fun. So I have officially signed up and attended my first Wilton Cake Decorating I class.
The tuition was $30.00. Not bad. Especially compared to some of my Grad School classes. On the syllabus it says that an additional $25-50 dollars in supplies may be needed. No biggie. Well, after the first class I purchased the 'essentials' and to date my total investment (not including gas for transportation) is around $90.00. Pretty spendy for a hobby. Or, I'm just a cheap-o.
The first class was great. Friendly people (around 15 of us in all), and a nice instructor. The instructor made everything look like, well, a piece of cake. At the end of the class she gave us our supply list, and our first assignment: bake a cake, frost it using the recipe for butter creme frosting Wilton requires, and bring in frosting for decoration in a differing color than what you use to frost the cake. Easy, right? Well, this is me we're talking about. Heh heh heh.
So, comes the day after class. I'm bored and decided to root around to find all the ingredients I need to make butter creme frosting. Turns out, I have it all on hand, and the Peanut and I whip up a batch of the icing. Super fast, really easy, everything is cleaned up and taken care of in 10 minutes. My kind of project. However, I tried to make blue (we're going to make a 'Rainbow cake' at our second class), since I liked how the blue looked in the demo. picture. I found out that if you use 'butter' flavored Crisco (hint: it is yellow-Hell-o!!) what would have been blue icing is actually...you're gonna love this...preschoolers know how to use the color wheel...GREEN!!! Hahahah. Moral of the story? Use white Crisco, that is unless, you like actually want to have off-colored icing. Anyway, I figured I'd still be able to work with my green-not-blue-icing. I'm resourceful, like that.
Now, today (Friday), I'm stressed because the nearly-two-year-old is being fussy and doesn't want to cooperate (will he ever want to cooperate, at any time during the rest of his life? Magic 8 Ball says: Signs point to no.) so I decided we all need a project to entertain us. We'll bake a cake! I thumbed through my 1940's era McCall's Cookbook (only the world's best cookbook, ever. It was my mom's, so I'm very sentimental about it) looking for a good cake recipe. There's a bunch of them, too bad I was feeling lazy. I stuck a post-it note in the cookbook, and proceeded to get out a red-velvet cake mix (the box kind, yes, I know I'm totally contradicting myself, here) and we slap that together, and bake it.
At class the teacher said that we could use a box cake-mix, but it would be harder to frost because of the crumbs. The teacher is right, box cakes make LOTS of crumbs. Frosting a cake using the decorating tools the right way is much harder than it looks. I did my best to frost my cake. That doesn't mean I'm gonna take home a blue ribbon at the county fair.
I'm glad I 'practiced' tonight. I'd hate to have brought my FUGLY green frosting red-carpet-cake with red crumbs in the frosting lopsided cake to class. How embarrassing! But, it was a good learning experience.
Times were, many moons ago, that I was a young independent woman who worked a simple little job and lived alone in her own house, and rarely touched a pot or pan. In fact, my friends from 'once upon a time' used to complain when they came over and tried to raid the 'fridge only to find no real food to speak of. I had been accused of having a 'bachelor's refrigerator' and I'd heard many refrains of: 'you have every condiment known to human kind in here but no food. That's messed-up!" (One of my co-workers, if she reads this, is going to throw up at that particular phrase--sorry! Just tellin' it like it is)
These days, I often cook. In fact, some months I cook nearly every night except "left-overs" night. Don't get confused, I still have those weeks where I still have every condiment known to human kind and no food, and well, we simply go out to eat. Yes. It is expensive, wasteful, and causes my waistline to creep further and further out latitudinally. However, for the most part, I cook. Healthy-ish meals, from scratch. I hate boxed 'convenience' food--it all tastes the same to me (bad) and let's face it, anything with a 3 year shelf-life shouldn't go into our bodies (note: I conveniently forget this piece of rhetoric as I order our dinner at the golden arches.)
So, along the lines of my newly donned domesticity, I have decided to take a cake decorating class with my friend, J. J. and I go out for walks on average of 2x a week. We're getting in shape--something other than round, preferably. And on one of our walks J. asked me if I'd be interested. Sure. Why not? Sounds fun. So I have officially signed up and attended my first Wilton Cake Decorating I class.
The tuition was $30.00. Not bad. Especially compared to some of my Grad School classes. On the syllabus it says that an additional $25-50 dollars in supplies may be needed. No biggie. Well, after the first class I purchased the 'essentials' and to date my total investment (not including gas for transportation) is around $90.00. Pretty spendy for a hobby. Or, I'm just a cheap-o.
The first class was great. Friendly people (around 15 of us in all), and a nice instructor. The instructor made everything look like, well, a piece of cake. At the end of the class she gave us our supply list, and our first assignment: bake a cake, frost it using the recipe for butter creme frosting Wilton requires, and bring in frosting for decoration in a differing color than what you use to frost the cake. Easy, right? Well, this is me we're talking about. Heh heh heh.
So, comes the day after class. I'm bored and decided to root around to find all the ingredients I need to make butter creme frosting. Turns out, I have it all on hand, and the Peanut and I whip up a batch of the icing. Super fast, really easy, everything is cleaned up and taken care of in 10 minutes. My kind of project. However, I tried to make blue (we're going to make a 'Rainbow cake' at our second class), since I liked how the blue looked in the demo. picture. I found out that if you use 'butter' flavored Crisco (hint: it is yellow-Hell-o!!) what would have been blue icing is actually...you're gonna love this...preschoolers know how to use the color wheel...GREEN!!! Hahahah. Moral of the story? Use white Crisco, that is unless, you like actually want to have off-colored icing. Anyway, I figured I'd still be able to work with my green-not-blue-icing. I'm resourceful, like that.
Now, today (Friday), I'm stressed because the nearly-two-year-old is being fussy and doesn't want to cooperate (will he ever want to cooperate, at any time during the rest of his life? Magic 8 Ball says: Signs point to no.) so I decided we all need a project to entertain us. We'll bake a cake! I thumbed through my 1940's era McCall's Cookbook (only the world's best cookbook, ever. It was my mom's, so I'm very sentimental about it) looking for a good cake recipe. There's a bunch of them, too bad I was feeling lazy. I stuck a post-it note in the cookbook, and proceeded to get out a red-velvet cake mix (the box kind, yes, I know I'm totally contradicting myself, here) and we slap that together, and bake it.
At class the teacher said that we could use a box cake-mix, but it would be harder to frost because of the crumbs. The teacher is right, box cakes make LOTS of crumbs. Frosting a cake using the decorating tools the right way is much harder than it looks. I did my best to frost my cake. That doesn't mean I'm gonna take home a blue ribbon at the county fair.
I'm glad I 'practiced' tonight. I'd hate to have brought my FUGLY green frosting red-carpet-cake with red crumbs in the frosting lopsided cake to class. How embarrassing! But, it was a good learning experience.
Peanut will wake up tomorrow and see a hideous crumbs-in-the-green-should-be-blue-icing and she will squeal with joy, because, this cake will be her 'birthday' cake that she's been asking for since Thursday, when we made the icing. So, even though it is ugly, and not at all professional looking, it is worth it because I know it will make a certain 4 year-old some one's day.
Once I finished admiring my abstract art and thinking of how much Peanut will like it I was really good. I cleaned up my mess right away, rather than wait until the morning and hope the magic husband fairy would come along and clean it up (never happens, but I can hope, right?). Holy cow! Butter creme frosting is a pain to clean; in fact, it is just plain icky. Let's just say, if you ever want to stop eating sweets, make a batch of butter creme icing, wash your utensils by hand, and look at the residue left in the sink. I now know exactly what the insides of my thighs look like--it ain't pretty. Yech!!! A good thing, though, 'cuz now I won't eat frosting.
Once I finished admiring my abstract art and thinking of how much Peanut will like it I was really good. I cleaned up my mess right away, rather than wait until the morning and hope the magic husband fairy would come along and clean it up (never happens, but I can hope, right?). Holy cow! Butter creme frosting is a pain to clean; in fact, it is just plain icky. Let's just say, if you ever want to stop eating sweets, make a batch of butter creme icing, wash your utensils by hand, and look at the residue left in the sink. I now know exactly what the insides of my thighs look like--it ain't pretty. Yech!!! A good thing, though, 'cuz now I won't eat frosting.
1 comment:
You've brought back so many memories for me. My mom and I took the Wilton cake decorating class many, many years ago at J.C. Penney's.(Seriously, I think I was 10 years old)
We had such a blast and she decorated a beautiful cake for Mother's Day for my grandmom and all the aunts.
You are sooo right about the butter creme frosting!
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