Life beyond buttercream

It does exist! There is something other than buttercream!

Okay, so I know a whole lot of people don't exactly like the royal icing. It's hard and crunchy, where buttercream is sweet and gooey. And I will blame most of the buttercream issues on the Wilton's recipe because I know there's all sorts of other ones out there (the hubbin' doesn't like how sweet it is anyway). But even with the fact that the royal dries out super quick, it just behaves so nicely.

Week 2 of Course 2 was all about colorflow and flowers. Everything we made will go on our final cake.

The first thing we did was make Colorflow icing. It's like royal, but harder. And it dries to a glossier finish. It's apparently pretty popular to use on cookies, but I will forever stand by my sugar cookie icing. There is absolutely nothing that tastes better. But the Colorflow is a handy way to make smaller decorations, particularly ones you can do ahead of time. I think that copying images out of kid's coloring books would go really well with this. Maybe favorite cartoon charachters.

Our Colorflow wasn't quite so exciting. We made birds.

These are the Wilton's preapproved decorations for our final cake. They're not all that bad, though they're sightless at the moment. We'll use the food color markers to add in the eyes and color in the beak. This little dude even looks sorta cute. Even makes me think of a certain person I know.  :)

The rest of the class was making royal icing flowers. I LOVE making flowers! And that's probably a good thing seeing as how we need a whole mess of them to make the cake. Of course the base for these is the petal that I totally rocked the week before.

We made apple blossoms:

A better view:

My understanding is that the apple blossoms are supposed to be a nice soft, barely pink color. But holy crap, the frosting turned a BRIGHT (nearly Karen) pink awful fast. So I'll take the colorful ones for now.

We also made violets:

They totally made me think of Alice in Wonderland, old-school Disney, not the new one. A little better view:

That one looks a little rough around the edges. I'm still working on the right angle to get the petal to curl in a little at the top. Gonna take some practice.

I I know it looks sparse, but I do have like 10 or so of each flower for the cake. Making more at the next lesson.