Have you paid homage to the gods of Wilton Cake i.e. taken any of their decorating courses?
How would you rate it or them on a scale of 1-10?
What did you make, aside from what the course(s) told you to?
How much of the Wilton Cake stuff did you buy, and why, and do you still like it?
As an aside, isn’t shortening disgusting in “buttercream” icing?
I took the 1st level, basic class a few years ago, and really enjoyed it. I have only made a couple of cakes since then but…it was still fun. I had long wanted to know how to do that fancy-schmancy stuff. I would give it an 8.5.
I bought the basic starter kit, spent about $50 or so over that, and have acquired another bunch of stuff at yard sales (cake pans, tips, flower nails, lettering guides.) Hey, there is still time for me to make fancy cakes!
yeah, the shortening is disgusting!
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
I didn’t think of getting stuff at yard sales, but I am going to watch the ads. Did you find that the 8" round 3" deep pan was pretty critical as a tool for making double layer cakes? I am trying to figure out just how much of the stuff I need to buy for real. Meringue powder I should be able to get anywhere. I might buy some of their colours, and definitely the piping gel. The leveling device seems pretty clever, too, but can’t I get by with my nice big serrated bread knife? And did you get the giganto flat tip that helps you lay the icing base on your cake?
I’m glad your rating came out pretty high. When I found out at the first lesson what all I’d have to do/bring for the second (and all in duplicate because our nine-year-old daughter is attending with me), I was a little freaked out. But I’ve been poring over Wilton cake books since I was a sprat, and I did learn some valuable tips even at that first lesson, so I want to stick with it!
Last question: were you compliant with the shortening business for the sake of the course? Or did you break right out and use butter/margarine? I have shortening, but after years of working in a small bakery as a teen, I’m honestly not sure I can bring myself to eat an icing with shortening in it, no matter how whitely white it is. 
The shortening icing is disgusting. Back when Current Employer Before The Buyout was a mostly-scratch bakery, we made our own icing. Something like 30 lbs. of confectioners sugar mixed with somethng like 20 lbs. of baker’s shortening (which had butter flavoring added to it)…ICK!
I took Wilton I a few years ago because I felt I wasn’t learning enough OTJ. This was when I was with Former Employer. Came to discover that I knew enough to go into Course 3 (fondant) without realizing it. However, I stuck it out.
For somebody who has absolutely NO experience with cake decorating, I highly recommend Course 1 because it covers all the basics. Our instructor was very patient, gave good demos, and gave a lot of individual help if you needed it. Those who went on to Course 2 felt quite confident in their budding abilities.
BTW, the shortening icing is recommended (even if it tastes nasty) because it’s less likely to break down, especially if you’re practicing flowers. Real buttercream is too volatile in texture, especially if you’re just starting out.
I guess as long as there’s hope for edible icing in the future, I can suffer through the “class” recipe. For what it’s worth, the Wilton site has a bunch of icing recipes that don’t all involve shortening, and describe the consistencies.
My grand plan for this at the moment is to make fancy cupcakes for our daughter’s 10th birthday in August. What is the best edible icing recipe to use for such an endeavour? I don’t want to make roses or drop flowers – just some pretty designs like hearts and rainbows – so it has to hold up reasonably but not intensely.
The shortening icing is a LOT easier to work with. Butter and margerine has such a low melt point that its best to work with it in a cold room - especially when doing the fancy stuff. That’s why they want shortening. Its easier to succeed with.
Why is shortening so disgusting? It’s just vegetable oil, isn’t it?
I didn’t take the Wilton classes – I took classes through our local community college. But I like the shortening icing for some things because it crusts over better than an all-butter icing does, and, as stated above, it’s more stable at various temperatures. Plus, I don’t have to worry about having the butter at room temperature before I go to make my frosting (I’m, um, not always the best at planning ahead…)!
I have the big ol’ icing tip for frosting cakes, but I used it once and didn’t like it. I find it easier to just use my offset spatulas (spatulae?).
I took the classes… 4 years ago? I think. It’s been ages since I made a rose, or any other flowers. I do a lot of cupcakes, and for those I just use a huge round or star tip and pipe a big swirl atop each cupcake, which is way faster than spreading the icing on. It looks really pretty, too. For round cakes, most people I know are pretty impressed with just a little border-thingy at the top and the bottom of the cake.
I’ve done a few wedding cakes, too, but only basic stuff. They’ve all been for friends, so I give them my labor as their wedding gift, and in return they don’t ask for difficult decoration. 
Gorgonzola, for your daughter’s birthday, you could do rainbow icing – fill your bag with a few different colors of icing, and then just pipe it on in a big swirl. Then, you could have the guests (especially if they’re all girls) add their own sprinkles and stuff. I think that would be fun! You could use cream cheese frosting, which doesn’t crust over as quickly, usually. Or 7-minute frosting, which is really sticky.
Some people think icing should taste buttery and be creamy, and shortening doesn’t have those qualities. Not everyone thinks it’s gross, though. I am addicted to bakery icing and I am in general not even all that fond of sweet things. I actually like getting one of those corner pieces off the sheet cakes when we have office celebrations. 
I thought the big icing tip kind of looked like more work – I mean, to use it, you fill and refill a big bag of icing and squeeze it out, and then end up spatulating all over the place anyway, rather than just using the spatula to deposit gobs of icing from the get-go. I’m guessing it works well to keep crumbs from infesting your cake, though. And I loved the tip the instructor showed us of using a spatula over parchment paper, then peeling the paper off to get a very smooth base.
Thanks for the cupcake ideas, stargazer! I think I will do that for the birthday party. Less work for me, and gives the kids something else to do! And cream cheese icing is a big family favourite.
True enough, Liberal, shortening is just hydrogenated vegetable oil. It’s not the trans fats that bother me though – it’s the fact that uncooked shortening – even “butter flavoured” – tastes like plastic to me. Part of my bias comes from those years at the bakery, and seeing how long bakeries leave out items made with shortening-based icing, basically because they can.
Because buttercreme made with butter is so gooooooood! Butter and sugar is nature’s perfect food.
(Its actually to sweet for me, but thinking you are getting buttercreme and getting sugar flavored shortening is a disappointing experience).
No problem! I’ve found that the more fat you have in your icing (in terms of the fat:sugar ratio), the less crusting over you will have. This is important if you want to ice the cupcakes, say, the night before the party. If it’s crusted over, the sprinkles won’t stick.
If that happens, you might be able to spritz the frosting with water or something, just before the sprinkle-frenzy, but I haven’t actually tried it. It could very well be one of those things that sounds great in theory but doesn’t actually work.
Depending on your capacity for mess, it might also be fun to let the kids frost their own cupcakes. You could get a bunch of disposable piping bags and some couplers, so they can trade out tips, and let them go to town. Or set it up in advance so that you have 2 bags of each color, with different tips, and they can trade them around. They could practice on wax paper taped to the table/countertop first, and then pipe stuff onto their cupcakes. And then you could take pictures of them with their creations!
You, um, might want to warn their parents first, lest they come home with frosting stains on their clothes…
Personally, I like whipped cream for a frosting. Or the less sweet frostings, like whatever it is they use on Red Velvet cake.
I used 9 inch cake pans for the course, because the 8 inch Wilton ones were incredibly expensive. I found those at yard sales later. Buy the basic set of colors in small pots, they last forever. I used and still use my serrated bread knife for leveling. I never used the giganto tip, just the spatula. I used the shortening icing because we were told to just use the same (colored) icing for the whole course & refrigerate it between classes. When we ate the cake, I pretty much scraped the icing off and threw it away. When you practice making flowers, you can scrape it up and put it back into the bag to re-use. Meringue powder is just dried egg whites, so if you run across those elsewhere, they might be cheaper.
Our instructor was very understanding about not wanting to buy a blue million supplies for the course, which helped.
I skipped all that buttercream stuff and went straight to fondant. Not so tasty but I like the way it looks. I started out buying some pre-made, but then bought the gum-tex and glucose to make my own since that way you can add flavor extracts and get the exact color you want . I was afraid that was all going to be very difficult but it turned out to be much easier than I thought. Also got a Martha Stewarty bug up my bum and even made marzipan birds as a cake topper. I was suffering from a bout of domesticity for a while there. 
You can easily add flavoring and color to the pre-made fondant (especially if you are fond of kneading). I think its a pain to make and since it tastes so lousy there isn’t any reason to make it myself - I’ve done it a few times and bought it a few times, buying it gives me more time to concentrate on the cake - which is where its at for me. It does make for pretty cakes though and its really easy to get a fantastic look with almost zero effort.
Shortening is disgusting as an alternative to butter or margarine. Remember that butter and margarine will melt at body temperature, hence it’s difficulty of use. Once you put some buttercream made with real butter in your mouth, it will 1) taste of butter, 2) melt in your mouth. If you use a lot of shortening on the other hand, you put a glob of buttercream in your mouth, it will 1) taste less like butter and more like shortening, 2) will remain in your mouth until you swallow. Basically, like putting fluffly shortening into your mouth vs fluffly butter (not exactly.)
I have taken all three courses. I’d rate them at about an 8, I think…the instructors I had were really good, and I learned enough to get me started. A big objective of the courses is to try and sell you Wilton stuff, of course, but my instructor was fairly cool about it and told us which items we really needed to do the course projects and which we didn’t have to bother with. I’m pretty sure I didn’t buy much beyond a couple cake pans and the course kits, and I got along just fine.
I’ve made several birthday cakes, a baby shower cake, and my own wedding cake.
Except for pans, all of my cake decorating stuff is Wilton, mostly because I haven’t found a place that sells non-Wilton stuff, and I haven’t had any problems with it (though they’re rather overpriced, especially the pans).
I like to use all butter in my frosting for icing the cake, and then use a frosting made with either all shortening or 50/50 for piping. That way, the majority of the frosting tastes good, but I don’t have to deal with the butter melting so fast in my (extremely warm) hands when I’m making flowers or doing scrollwork or whatever.
I never took any classes, though MIL had a ton of books laying around, so I just had a gander at those.
I’ve done about a dozen wedding cakes and tons of birthday cakes.
So if you’re pretty apt about these things, I don’t think you would necessarily need the classes at all, you could practice in your home with a book or three.
I was lucky and inherited not just the books from MIL, but a ton of tips as well. I had to buy some odds and ends things, but the pans were the most costly thing, and then if you have a Michael’s or Hobby Lobby near you, use the coupons, 40% off isn’t a bad deal at all.
Most often I work with fonadant or gum paste for fancier things now, with the disclaimer that people could technically eat them, but they don’t taste all that great.
I’m currently up to about twelve eighteen gallon totes of cake decorating stuff. Sounds like a lot, but when you consider the size of some of the specialty pans. eBay is another good place to check out pans as well, I lust after the groovy 70’s van, one day it will be mine.
And yes, the shortening frosting is very unappetizing. There are a lot of other choices you could go with, but for practice, you can’t beat it. And if it’s for kids, they love it. I once had to get on the phone with a co-worker of my husbands to confirm that yes, their bakery cakes were frosted with shortening and powdered sugar, more than a person should eat in a month on a single serving at that.
And yes, Wilton has the market for cake decorating, there are alternatives to the simple pans however, I have found a lot at commercial restaurant stores, at better prices.