This is it...

The last cake from my decorating class. Some of the royal icing flowers I saved and a bit of marzipan made it onto this vanilla buttercream cake.

Marzipan roses

We've moved on to marzipan from icing - kind of like working with Play Dough, but more annoying. Next week is our final cake!

Buttercream & lilies

We decorated our second real cake in class today and learned the basket weave technique. This one was iced in buttercream, which I didn't realize was so fattening until I dropped the pound of butter into the bowl.

We topped our cakes with lilies of the valley. Only two classes left. I need some inspiration for my final cake. Luckily, The Knot has 1800 ideas!

More flowers..

Some more royal icing flowers...this time, primroses, daffodils and chrysanthemums. Daffodil petals are made pointy by pinching the edges after dipping your fingers in corn starch (need to practice these!).

The blue/purple combo is colour striping: two icing colours are added to the piping bag to create the effect you see here.

Experimenting with flowers

Some pansies and apple blossoms made of royal icing...harder than I thought they would be! Practice is already helping though. These aren't as interesting when they're not attached to something covered with icing, but I'm saving all of them for my final cake in Week 10.

Progress in the form of cake

It's already Week 5 of my cake decorating class - time to start practicing on a real cake instead of parchment paper. My roses are getting better; a week ago they were a runny mess. Decorating is so precise and requires a lot of patience - and I none to speak of prior to taking this class, so it's helped me with that.

After class, someone on the elevator asked me what class I was taking and when I told him he said: "Cooking is an art, but baking is a science! You have to follow the rules." I think that's why I like it.

Rope & rosettes

In addition to my pie class, I'm also taking Cake Decorating I. This week we began practicing with buttercream icing, made with shortening (usually unsalted butter but this was just practice), water and icing sugar.

We started off with stars, zigzags and shells, followed by reverse shells, rosettes and rope. The reverse shells and rosettes (below, top) are killing me, I need to practice some more. I would love to cover a whole cake with stars: