In depth review of Wilton Course 4 (continued)

Hello Cake Decorators!
This is a continued  review on the newest Wilton Course #4: Advanced Gumpaste Flowers. (See the beginning of my review here.)

I was really excited to sign up for this class at the local AC Moore, and even more excited that I would have the same teacher as I did for the other three courses, and also be in the same class as a woman I took the last two courses with (flowers & cake design and gum paste & fondant). Aside from the people, I was super excited about the course, who doesn’t love those crazy-real looking flowers on cakes? I always have loved them!

During the course we made petals for all kinds of flowers (like a lily) and some different types of leaves as well (lily leaves, ivy leaves). We also learned how to make the briar rose, along with tiny blossoms, and some other nice looking flowers.

One of my favorite parts of the course was class 3 when we learned how to color our gum paste with Wilton’s Color Dust and Food Writer markers. This made our lily petals look so real (you can see a photo of it in a previous blog post here)! I loved the outcome, and it was really easy. The color dust is something I’ve wanted to learn how to do, but have never tried (except for one horrible time when I made gum paste carnations the wrong color and had to color them—so I used the liquid coloring method, of adding vodka to the color dust and straight-up painting the finished flower shapes. It was…interesting. The gum paste got a little soft in places, but overall they ended up looking really nice, despite the vodka smell).

Being that this was the first month that the course is being offered, I feel like there are some kinks to be worked out. The kit is really nice and the products that come with it are good. It’s also good that Wilton takes into account that you have tons of stuff from the past four courses, so you can just use that stuff in place of buying new things. But, one thing is time. There seems to be a lot of time left over because we would finish making something and need it to dry, so often we just sat there or had about 45 minutes left before the course was supposed to be finished.

The other thing about this course is I feel like I haven’t actually make anything throughout the first 3 weeks. A lot of the flowers are just pieces on wire, waiting for their assembly in class 4. You don’t really have anything to show for the class besides a gerbera daisy (that is huge and not attached to a wire) and some other flowers that will later be put into a bouquet (like the briar rose and ivy, along with the blossoms). I feel like a lot of time is spent putting the floral tape around the wires, rather than focusing on the cake decorating. This is a good aspect though, I guess even though I don’t like it, because it shows us how to use different mediums with our decorating. The other thing I don’t like is we don’t decorate anything in our final class! Wilton is notorious for having students decorate a final cake in class 4. I feel like Course 4 is disjointed from the rest because we will be used lots of floral tape to assemble bouquets, not being creative in our cake decorating.

I would give the class 4.5 stars out of 5. There are some quirks and some aspects I was surprised about, but I do enjoy the course and the flowers that we learned how to make. They are beautiful, and I think in time it will be a good course. I’m just happy that there is another Wilton course beyond what has been in place for years!