Cake decorating course!

I had my first "advanced" cake decorating course yesterday. It was with Learn2Craft, I've done both of her beginners' courses as well. New for the advanced course were two important aspects: tiered cakes and modelling chocolate. I'm going to show off shamelessly here:

 The most time went into the three-tiered one at the back, obviously. We made all the flowers by hand, and the second layer was my first chance to use an impression mat - I love it but it's going to take a while to do it perfectly! Here's a closer look:

 Look how the bottom piping on the right melted when I put it in the car! It was literally in the boot for about 2 minutes while I went back inside to fetch the other container with the other two cakes, but in that small time the icing melted and many of the flowers fell off - so I had to reattach them at home. Clearly the car was too hot! My friend Lee held her and my three-tiered cakes on her lap on the way home, otherwise I think I would have had real trouble.

A closer look. I'm proud of how the flowers turned out!

The second cake was my first attempt at making arum lilies, and I think it's the prettiest flower I've made to date:

The stamen in the middle is dipped in egg white and then in semolina that has been coloured yellow, to give it that authentic look. Isn't it beautiful!

Then the last little cake, which arguably isn't as pretty as the other two, was covered in modelling chocolate with a chocolate rose on top. I found the dark modelling chocolate quite hard to work with, you'll see my rose is not perfect by any definition. But the discovery of the day was the white modelling chocolate - it tastes SOOO much better than fondant, you can roll it thinner and other than that you can do pretty much anything with it that you would normally do with fondant. I'm excited to do more modelling chocolate work!

For some reason I can't upload the picture I want to show you - just a close-up of the small cake. I'll try to edit after I've posted this. I'm still too new to blogging to be able to troubleshoot effectively.