Adventures in Cake Decorating: Day 2

Hello again! I've been busy finding the perfect recipes for a very special Valentines dinner for my husband and I but I took a break to practice my piping skills some more. This time I dyed the icing with Wilton's Moss Green color. One thing I noticed about the icing coloring was that the color seemed to deepen after sitting for a couple minutes. 

I'm using the Cake Decorating Beginners Guide by Wilton to teach myself basic skills of decorating a cake with icing. I like this book because it shows you the angles your bag should be at for particular tips and styles you're trying to do. It also has some very fun cake designs that incorporate your new found decorating skills. So far I've been using the Wilton recipe for basic buttercream icing. This recipe produces icing that is of medium consistency and is very easy to work with. 

Now onto the good stuff... the practice pictures.

I started off with using the round tip #8 to try my hand at some dot flowers. I started with the center dot and then used the perimeter as my guide to pipe the petals. As you can see, I did well on the first few petals on the left flower, but I lost my stride towards the bottom. The petals are too far apart on the flower that's on the right. Once I was finished with the flowers, I gave doing some spirals with the round tip. Those came more naturally to me than the flowers did. They're pretty simple as long as you start from the inside and work your way out. I have no idea what I was trying to accomplish with the spiral on the far right, haha.  After I was done practicing with the spirals, I changed to the star tip #16 to work on some zig zags. The first zig zag (top) went a lot better than the second (bottom). I think the consistency of my icing was too thin and my lack of hand-eye coordination were the culprits that prevented me from making the perfect zig zag.

I moved on to rosettes after my zigzag attempt. I tried making a flower out of the rosettes just as I had out of the dots. I started with the inside rosette and worked my way around that.I had a problem keeping the rosette together. I need to work on keeping the swirls together when making the rosettes. All in all, I'd say it didn't turn out as bad as other attempts I made this time around.  

Next, I switched to the closed star tip #27 and made an attempt at some swirl drop flowers. At the time, I thought that me and swirl drop flowers just weren't meant to be partners. But then I realized that I was using the wrong kind of tip! I should have been using the drop flower tip #1B but like I said before I was using the closed star tip. No wonder they turned out as horrifically as they did. This is proof that this is a dreadfully honest account of a first time cake decorator! haha 

And last but certainly not least... leaves. As you can tell, that failed miserably. I have no words for these other than I need A LOT of practice. 

This is my second attempt at the art of piping icing. I am optimistic about my progress for the future. I have nowhere to go but up, right?! Please stay tuned for the next installment of Adventures in Cake Decorating!