Wilton Course 2

In the Wilton Course 2, we continued piping based on what we had learnt in the first course, but now, we mostly piped with Royal Icing. With Royal Icing, you have to be really careful to cover it up carefully with clingfilm or it will dry really quickly, and whenever you are not using your piping bags, you need to keep the tips covered with a damp towel or they will also dry out. On the other hand, RI is not as temperature sensitive as buttercream, so it won't go soft as quickly from holding the piping bag. RI also has the benefit that once it has been piped and dried, it can be kept for a long time, so decorations can be made way ahead of time.

We continued piping different borders and other basic things. One interesting technique that we were taught was the basket weave pattern. It look quite nice (see pictures below), but it is a bit labor-intensive. Not very difficult though. We also continued to make lots of different flowers, which were a bit more advanced than the ones in course 1, mostly making use of the flower nail. We made chrysantemums, daffodils, pansies, violets, and also a new type of rose, the Victorian rose.

Some of the flowers we piped

Basketweave pattern on a cake

That cake with some flowers and borders on as well.

Wilton Course 1

While I've been quite good (if I may say so myself...) at making cakes that are delicious, I have not given much focus to decorating the cakes. I've done some very basic piping (I only had a couple of different tips) and decorated the wedding cake I made with some sugar paste flowers. Now it was however time to change this and be able to make cakes that not only taste good, but that look nice as well. Therefore I signed up for a series of three cake decorating courses based on the Wilton(TM) series of courses. Each course was over a weekend (two days from 9-16.30 approximately) and was given by Camilla Sala at the company Kakburken ("The Cookie Jar") outside of Stockholm. Their web site can be found at http://www.kakburken.se/ and I can recommend the courses to anyone that wants to be able to make nice looking decorations for their cakes. Some of the results from the first course have already been displayed here in the previous post (the roses on the chocolate festival cake).
The following three posts will be one for each of the courses.

Wilton Course 1
This was the basic Wilton course in cake decoration and focused on piping techniques using buttercream. It also went through basics like covering your cake with buttercream, etc. Since I would never consider covering a real cake that I made with buttercream, that was less interesting to me, but the decorating aspects of the course were very good. We were taught many piping basics and did various simple flowers and stars, shell borders, lines, pattern transfers, and other useful things. The most interesting thing was obviously piping the roses. Extremely tricky at first, but once you got the hang of it (which didn't really happen until after the course for me), it is actually rather simple and a very quick way to get a nice looking rose for your cake.