Sweetness on Sundays with Wilton Method courses

Sometimes when you find something you really like doing you actually get the opportunity to keep exploring it for a little while longer before the training wheels come off and you take some time and discipline to do it all by yourself. In this instance I am referring to cake decorating. You may recall that a little while ago I did a short cupcake decorating class as documented here. It was a really fun way to spend my Saturday morning and definitely got the creative juices flowing. Well a few weeks later I was fortunate enough, thanks to some fairy god-people, to have the opportunity to take this to the next level and subsequently enrolled in the Wilton Method I, II and III cake decorating courses at Cookshop. The location was so great the first time around and I was excited to know that we would be having the same instructor. So for six Sundays, which concluded yesterday, I put my learning cap back on and tried to soak up as much information about cake decorating as I could. The first two Sundays were Wilton Method course I - decorating basics. As the title suggests we literally learnt the basics, from how to bake a great cake to how to give it a smoothly frosted finish to form the base for some newly learned frosting techniques. Below are the somewhat imperfect finished products from the first two weeks:

It is worth noting that as with most courses you take these days there was homework required prior to the second week of each course. It usually consisted of baking a cake and whipping up some frosting to either take to class separately or to have already put together. For the third and fourth Sundays the focus was on Wilton Method course II - flowers and cake design. This course saw us build on the skills and techniques we had already learnt as well as working with royal icing, gum paste and fondant to make an array of flowers. It all culminated with learning the basket weave technique, which I then used to finish decorating the cake we had brought into class already pre-frosted. The flowers as well as the finished cake looked like this:

The last of the 3 courses was held on the fifth and sixth Sunday. Wilton Method course III - gum paste and fondant allowed us to learn how to make a bow from start to finish using a gum paste and fondant blend. We also made several types of flowers and covered a pre-frosted cake in fondant. The finishing touches were achieved by decorating the fondant cake with whatever previously created items we wished to use. All in all it wasn't too shabby an effort as you can see:

I feel like I need a disclaimer stating that the instructor did assist with my finished products so it is not 100% my work, but what I lacked in skill I made up for with my eagerness to learn. I may not be a pro by any stretch of the imagination, but with a bit of practice I can only get better. Wilton Method courses are readily available across the globe and I recommend doing a Google search to find your local option.