This Week's Cakes!! (Sorry for the poor formatting)

Cakes From This Week

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!

Wilton Course 4 Review

Hello Cake Decorators!

I am very excited to say that I took the Wilton Course 4 class “Advanced Gum Paste Flowers” in February! I have been looking forward to taking it since I heard about it from the local Wilton instructor last summer.  I really do love the Wilton-method classes. Although they require a lot of supplies, and you will feel like you have purchased Wilton’s entire line of products, I feel that it is definitely worth it! Especially if you want to make a career out of baking and cake decorating! 

I have also taken a commercial baking course at the local community college, and I must say, although I value the skills I learned in that class, I like the Wilton method of cake decorating much better—even for simple cake designs. I feel that although commercial kitchens may be operating very efficiently, the “Wilton way” is just as good and has a little nicer, less commercial outcome. Also, the Wilton courses are much more extravagant than a commercial baking class, focusing only on cake decoration. I have loved learning about fondant, gum paste, and how to utilize these items along with various tools to create a fabulous looking cake. I really loved learning how to make gum paste flowers in Course 3 “Gum Paste & Fondant,” but I must say that learning the gerbera daisies (my favorite flower!) in course 4 was super fun and easy! I was also interested in learning about the flowers that have multiple wire petals, and just how to  assemble them. I must say, that I was pleasantly surprised with how easy the process is—although it is annoying to figure out how exactly you are going to stick the wire stems into a cake (you have to use some sort of something as wire is not edible). So I found the “Great Value” flexible straws to be the easiest for this since they are large and will accommodate the large amounts of wire. Good luck if you take this new course at your local craft store!

See the continuation of my review here.