Adventures in Cake Decorating

The young women in our ward at church are having a fundraiser at the ward party tomorrow where people will bring desserts and they will be auctioned off to raise money for the girls to go to their summer camp this year. Since we probably couldn’t bid much on the desserts in the auction, I thought we could contribute my making some of the desserts. So, this morning the boys helped me make some cakes. I got some fun icing tubes at the grocery store and googled photos of decorated cakes on the internet to get some ideas. I found several I liked, and I thought that I could probably pull off some of the more simple flower and curly-q designs. So, first we baked the cakes. I had a lot of helpers in the kitchen, but we were doing all right so far. I practiced some of the little flower designs and then got started.

After frosting the cakes I started in on decorating the first one. Here is how it turned out:

It was supposed to look something like this:

I thought it was ok. I knew that my flowers would be a lot more simple than the roses on the picture I found. But I wasn’t too impressed with my results. I am a perfectionist, and I am not satisfied with less-than-professional results on things like decorated cakes, Halloween costumes, and family portraits, but what could I do? I was thinking it might be a little embarrassing to take this cake for the fundraiser auction, since I suppose that everyone else who brings desserts for it will either bring something fancy looking or something really normal, like chocolate chip cookies. But I figured maybe my cake would get sympathy bids in the auction or something. (If all else fails, I guess they’ll give the cake back to us at the end if no one buys it, and we can eat it – it should still taste good, no matter how funny it looks.

So, I tried the second cake. I was going for something with this kind of design:

And this is what I got. Although I didn’t think mine turned out fantastic, I thought it was better than the first one.

By the time I got to the last one, I didn’t have more ideas of how to decorate it, so it didn’t get decorated. Plus, the cake broke a little when I took it out of the pan, so you can see the cracks in the cake through the frosting. Oh well. At least it probably tastes good.

Oh, and remember the first cake I made? Well, by the time I was done with cake #3, this is what it looked like:

I guess the frosting was too heavy or something, and it all slid off the side of the cake. Maybe I will donate my cakes to the auction anonymously.