Baking a Cake

For Christmas this year, we got Kayla a bunch of cake decorating supplies. She decided to buy even more with her Christmas money, so we went to Hobby Lobby and came out with this bundle of goodies!
 
She is in love with the Ace of Cakes show on Food Network. She is very artistic and thinks she might want to do this for a living, so we decided to take a stab at cake decorating for a home economics course for homeschool this year.
She is great in the kitchen. She helps me cook all the time, so I felt very comfortable letting her loose to “bake away the day”.
 

The cake of course was not a boxed cake mix. It is a homemade cake recipe that has become my go-to mix when I need cupcakes or a fast yellow cake. It is from The Hillbilly Housewife website.
Here are a couple of tips for when baking cakes. These are things I have learned from watching other shows on television 1) Use a ladle to spoon the batter into each of your pans so that each cake has the same amount. 2) After putting the batter into the pans, gently drop the pans on the counter to bring all the air bubbles to the surface so that the cake cooks evenly.
After getting the cake prepped and in the oven, it was time to make the icing. I was shocked that the Wilton butter cream icing doesn’t even have butter in it! It uses shortening, milk, vanilla, and powdered sugar. It is VERY sweet and OH SO GOOD! The trick to getting it stiff for decorations is meringue powder.

After making the icing, we learned the proper technique to color icing. In fact, we learned how to make striped icing, which would make an awesome decoration by the way!

Since green is her favorite color, that is the color of our cake.
You have to also know that in order for a cake to be nice and flat, you have to level it. For that, you need a cake leveler. They are not expensive.
After all of this had taken place, it was finally time to icing the cake. Kayla did a fabulous job following the instructions in her Wilton Course 1 Cake decorating book. 
She got to also practice writing with the writing tip. Since we made this cake on New Year’s Eve, we decided to make this a “New Year” cake.
Our next lesson is on learning how to make bows and other decorations.
I think this is a great way to start back to school, don’t you?