Inked Flowers

Well, this week I decided to try a technique I read about in my Wilton Course 1 book. It stated that by painting the inside of the bag, you can get a striped effect once you load the icing.

OK... so, yeah I got a striped effect but, honestly, I couldn't enjoy it because I was too busy throwing my icing bag across my kitchen. (Yes, I literally threw it when, after hours of trial and error... ok, more error than anything... I got so frustrated with the flowers I'd chosen to use on this cake.)

The overall is effect is this:



...which I can't say I'm too thrilled with.

Unlike my "Shoot for the Stars" cake, this week I used the buttercream icing recipe that is listed in our book. I used regular shortening instead of the butter flavored. The color came out as pure white, even though I used traditional vanilla flavoring. The taste was dramatically different than the butter flavored shortening recipe. I didn't notice the strong butter flavor of the star cake until compared directly with this week's recipe. The use of the regular shortening gave the icing batch a more pure sugar taste.

I saw this style flower in my course book and thought it would be cute to use with my planned pink/black/white coloring. I wanted something girly but tough if that makes any sense... you know, like wearing skulls covered in glitter. It's girly and feminine but has a bit of an edge to it.

I didn't put near as many flowers as I had planned and, to be completely honest, I didn't even finish the cake. By midnight I was tired and frustrated and after hours of redoing flowers I was done. The thing about this particular flower is that is works about 1 in 4 times when you have something to touch the tip to... when you have to do a "floating" flower in this style, it's just a disaster.




After trying about 30 times to get flowers around the base, I gave up. (And made a huge note in my chef's book that these are not the flowers to use when you a-need a large number of flowers, b-don't have a solid surface on which to anchor them, and c-are me.)

I DID like the colors on this cake. The pink came out better than I'd hoped. I used Wilton's Pink Rose and was expecting a light, girly pink. The color I got was fabulous for my purposes this week. It's an edgier pink, instead of something you'd see on a baby shower cake traditionally.

The effect of the black painted inside the icing bag was not what I expected but I like the possibilities on the technique. I plan on trying this technique on several other designs, such as borders and writing to see what happens. I'll post pics of those practice sessions once I'm done.

The initial plan for the flowers was to have some be totally white, some have just a tiny bit of black, and others have mostly black. As you can see above, I got the basic concept down. The form of the flowers is another story.

I did exactly the same thing I practiced in class and even softened the icing, followed by hardening the icing when the flowers just would NOT form the right way. Well, more accurately, they wouldnt let go of the icing tip. Like I said, if you have a solid base to set the tip against, the flowers do well about 25% of the time. If you try to make them floating above the surface (for instance, while putting them around the base on top of the shell border) that number drops to about 1 in 15.



Overall, I don't think I care for the black on white... at least not for this particular design. I think using the colors for borders may prove to be more attractive. I plan on trying it with my final cake for course 1 next week, using purple and blue striping. Hopefully, it will prove to be more appealing to the eye than the flowers from this week.



I don't think it was completely horrible. Being the perfectionist that I am, I tend to critique myself to the nth degree but I do see the positives as well. If I saw this in a bakery, my first reaction would probably be, "Oh, that's cute." It's not a masterpiece but I admit it doesn't totally suck. I'm proud of it... and even with the flinging of the icing bag across the kitchen, I had fun... which is, after all, the most important part of all of this.