The frosting/filling combos were not all winners, lemon on simple yellow cake was nice, but boy, that is a good cake recipe! Fortunatley or unfortunatley, again I'll let you decide, the recipe made about a bazillion cupcakes, so I baked 12 to use up my leftovers and made the rest of the batter into 2 6 inch rounds which are now in the freezer. We'll see what comes up to use up those :).
I thought I could do a simple design with 3 rows of cupcakes in the corresponding colors with a fondant cutout to make the moon and star.
I went ahead and bought the gluten free icing made by them also, because the gluten free recipes called for gluten free vanilla. I didn't think I'd use much of it, so I decided not to buy a bottle. Little did I know that the vanilla I had at home was gluten free, so I could have made it myself, but oh well. 
Of course I had to do a practice run, before the big day. I thought maybe I should just try out the technique with something easy like a flower or a smiley face, but I figured, I should just jump right in so I could learn what to do better on this particular picture. So here is my first draft.
This is just a 6 in round, so the first thing I learned was that using the #3 tip was too large for such a small cake, it made the details to scrunched up. But I thought it would look good on a bigger cake. I was experimenting with trying to get texture in the hair with the squiggles, but that just looked weird, so I did not do that for the final one. I also really wasn't sure what to do for a border, and I think I ran out of icing, so I skipped it.
Not as good as the original art of course, but not bad. Everyone knew what it was supposed to be. I experimented with the star border around the image itself. It was hard to come up with something that wouldn't look too frilly with such a modern image. I think if I made a butterfly cake or something, I could have done flowers around it or something. I also learned that when piping the border around the image in the base color (white/cream cheese in this case), I should just do one time around. The first transfer was not very thick, so I tried to make it come off the cake more with a thicker border. It was thicker all together, but the outline was far too wide. Good lesson for next time. I did a simple rope border around the edge, but cream cheese frosting is kinda hard to work with. I had to do the piping quickly before it got to warm. And it was difficult to get a very smooth edge. I think lilies are awesome. They are beautiful, smell delicious, but I love how they are so tenacious. They are a bulb flower, so they grow stalks and leaves, then bloom, then die, but the bulb lives, and the whole thing starts again next spring. What I think is amazing, is that year after year, they just keep coming back to life, even if I don't water them. No wonder lilies are a symbol of Easter, they are the perfect flower to remind us of the resurrection.
Every year, their stalks and leaves poke out in early spring, and remind me that there was something inside that pot! I'm always grateful I didn't decide to plant something else in there, because I forgot about them.
This year, they surprised me more than ever. First of all, almost everything in my garden that is not self sustaining has died...because with Emeline around, I'm not the best waterer. But what's more is that the lily pot somehow got knocked over over the winter months, and I didn't notice. But you know what happened? Those lilies did not give up. This is what I found when I went outside.
Tenacious lilies. Yeah :).
Seeing these pictures now make me hungry!
Here's Noah enjoying his birthday cake!
For my final cake for the class I wanted to try a basket weave cake. I wasn't sure how it would turn out on my first try, but I think it went well. I made about a zillion daffodils and purple roses out of royal icing, but then in class we practiced the roses one more time in buttecream, and I thought the white went nicley with the yellow and chocolate, so I didn't use the purple roses. Now I've got to make another cake to put them on something :) So this cake is also yellow cake with chocolate icing, but a different yellow cake, and has a standard chocolate buttercream icing. 
I was very pleased with how my roses turned out. Buttercream is much easier to pipe than royal icing, and all the practice making the zillion purple ones paid off. The basket weave and rope border went well, but I think my icing was still a little over beaten, because it's not as smooth as I'd like. So I'd like to work on that.
I didn't try any fancy decorating, cause I wasn't sure what I could pull off with whipped cream. I decided to wing it with a shell border, but that didn't turn out looking much like shells, but it gave me an idea of what it is like to pipe with whipped cream. It had fallen a bit by the time I got to piping, so I knew what needed to be different for next time. It was also surprisingly easy to get a smooth finish with my spatula, and I was very happy with that!
Esther and the fam said it tasted great, so I was happy. It was so fun to learn something new and have it turn out well, as well as to give a fun gift to my awesome friend!
Top left & right: Mum and daisy. Middle left & right: Rose & calla lilly. My rose got a little smooshed in transit, but you can get the idea. Very delicate petals. Bottom left & right: carnation & various cutouts, inlays & overlays. 
Fondant flower cutouts on carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. I just used some color I had left over to test it out. Wes suggested some green so I rearranged and added some stems and leaves in buttercream. First draft revised:
Next I wanted to try another cake recipe as well as experimenting with some new colors I bought. This time I did inlays for the centers of the flowers, and I made fondant stems and leaves. Second draft:
And finally....ta da! The final product! Little cake, big cake, and cupcakes!
I added some yellow sugar to the flower center inlays to give them some sparkle, and I put a leaf with each flower on the cupcake to carry the green accents over to the cupcakes. I used a base of tip 1M for the cupcake swirls. I was pretty happy with the result. Nothing super fancy, but colorful and fun. I think the one thing I would change is to use a frosting shaper on the cakes to give them some ridges...instead of aiming for a smooth finish. Smooth is so hard to get right, and the ridges would coordinate with the swirls on the cupcakes.
Not all together bad, but if you look closely you can see some yellow oozing out of my flower. My piping gel was too runny, and I didn't fill it in well enough with icing. I should have traced it larger to cover it up, but I guess I was being conservative. My border is ok, but my dots need work.
First problem: Brown icing. Brown icing never looks right. Esp when you don't use brown coloring. I read online you can make brown with red and green, so I tried that. It's kinda brown, but if I ever have to make brown again (which I will avoid like the plague), I'll use a brown food coloring. Second mistake...brown icing with a tip 12 (large round tip) will almost always create poo. That was not my goal here. Third mistake, the logo actually uses 3 colors, black brown, and red. I should have splurged and made all three, rather than trying to just use two. And mistake number four: Don't wing it on writing on a cake. LOL. I knew this would happen. We learned techniques for printing on a cake that week in class, and I know I'm terrible at it. But I thought, hey, here's an opportunity to practice. So I just went for it, knowing full well it would look bad. And, I was right. It did look bad. But at least I wasn't surprised. So I hope you got a good laugh out of Poo Frank.
I don't actually have that much critique for this cake. I think this is about as good as I'll get at dimensional decorating. As I've since learned, there are a lot more interesting things to put on a cake :)
I had some serious issues with my icing consistency on some of these, but that was an important mistake to make. Icing consistency is key! And I'm not very patient with learning things, so this was a good exercise in just doing stars for a long time to make some nice ones, without wierd points, blobs etc. And as my teacher always says, "it's ok, you get to eat your mistakes!"
Looking back on these photos, they aren't bad, but the ruffling of the edges is probably because I beat the icing too much, and there is too much air. And, I could never make it flat like the ribbon rose they are supposed to be, so apparently these are Victorian roses instead. Fine by me :)
The top two show drop flowers, which are very easy and look nice. The middle left has a pom pom flower, middle right more drop flowers on a traditional cupcake piping base. Bottom left has a very wilted looking shaggy mum, and bottom right...I don't know what you call that other than trying to use up some icing.
This was before I worked very hard to get a smooth base layer of icing. It's actually quite hard to do, but I've gotten better at it. This has a base of cream cheese, with buttercream flowers and leaves. I used the Witon bake even strips, which help you to get a flat cake without the normal dome you have to trim off (not that I did that before taking this class, even though I knew you should ;) ). Anyway, apparently carrot cake is not like your standard cake, so the strips accentuated the cake's tendency to fall. So I had to compensate with a big mound of drop flowers. I think it worked ok. The cake tasted great, was a hit, and not bad for my first real cake after some classes.
