Cake decorating with chocolate and jelly

I attended the last night of my cake decorating course at William Angliss on Tuesday. To finish out the course, we made ready to roll fondant plaques, and decorated them with chocolate and jelly.

The chocolate was both easier and harder than icing to decorate with - easier because it flows more quickly, and harder because it has a nasty tendency to harden in the piping bag tip before you are finished, and if you cut your piping bag tip too large, it flows all over the place.

I loved the jelly overlay, because it was bright, colourful and reminded me of stained glass.

We had to make two plaques, and through sheer luck, I had two useful occasions to make plaques for. I decorated my first plaque for the top of a cake which I made that evening after class for Kane from work. By chance, I had learned that he turned 30 the next day, and I thought what better way to celebrate a milestone by having a special cake:

I used my new piping skills to pipe whipped cream in and around the cake. The chocolate cake itself was the recipe from the Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook that I have made before, just filled and decorated differently. Kane was very happy with his cake, as he had never had a birthday cake at work before. The feedback was that it tasted good (relief!).

My second plaque is for Mothers Day this coming Sunday:

I am flying home to see my Mum for Mothers Day and taking Monday off so that I don't have to hurry back. I will probably make Mum a plain madeira cake (she doesn't like "goopy" cakes) and stick the plaque on it with very small icing rosettes.

I am so glad that I did the cake decorating class. Although I sometimes didn't feel like going anywhere but home after work (let's face it, do I ever feel like doing anything else?), and we were often under the hammer to complete the various projects within the available timeframe, it was well worth it, as I learned a lot. Cake decorating hasn't been my forte in the past, and I am not a "natural" at it, but I have definitely acquired some skills to make my celebration cakes look

more special (provided that I am not too lazy!!). Thanks to Greg Williams, our teacher, for passing on some of his skills to us, and for his patience with our often none-too-tidy work habits.