Super Bowl Party!

   The Super Bowl has always been a great time for a party.  Alyssa bought me a football pan a couple of years ago and it's never really turned out very well for us.  This time I figured I could put a little something together.  As I was browsing cake central, I came across a different IMBC recipe that I decided to try.  It was really good.  It came together really well and had a nice taste to it.   One thing I haven't quite figured out yet is how to smooth IMBC.  I read that you can take a knife dipped in warm water to smooth it, but that just caused streaks in the cake.

  If you look closely here you can see the separate shades of the brown where I ran the knife over and the areas I didn't.  Additionally, it didn't really smooth very well, but it was a rounded cake, so I think that was part of the problem.  The brown is actually my first attempt at Chocolate IMBC.  I melted about 4 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate and added it to half of the frosting.  The chocolate made the IMBC runny which made it a little harder to work with.  Additionally, I tried to darken the chocolate with some brown, but it wasn't going any darker.  The regular vanilla was nice and firm and the stars for the logos and the stripes on the ball piped in nice and firm.  To do the logos, I did a piping transfer.  I printed out the logos, and then traced them onto some parchment paper with piping gel.  I then placed the parchment paper on the cake and transfered the gel to the cake for the outline.  For the Colts side, I placed the parchment paper on before the frosting had set up, so the frosting stuck to the paper.  If you look at the center of the horseshoe, you can see where the frosting got pulled up.

   The logo for the saints was initially supposed to be gold with a black border, but I could not get a good gold color and apparently there is not a gold coloring.  The grass was added using a #233 grass tip.  The cake looked great, but the taste was lacking.  The football cake pan takes a really long time to cook, so the cake came out really dry.  The edges were practically burnt and rock hard.  The chocolate IMBC was definitely a win though. More practice and testing needed to get the taste and consistency needed so I can decorate with it.  I'm not a big fan of Semi-Sweet chocolate, so I want to try milk chocolate next time.

Stats:

• Yellow Cake Mix - Better than ? Cake.
• Vanilla IMBC for decorations.
• Chocolate IMBC for football.

FTW:

• Football Cake!
• Chocolate IMBC badge earned

FTL:

• Cake was extremely dry.
• Chocolate frosting came out runny.
• Couldn't smooth the IMBC as well as I would have liked.

Wilton Course 1 Class 4 Complete

        Well this was it.  The final class in Course 1 and it's the class most people take the course for.  The "Wilton Rose."  We spent the entire two hours learning how to do the rose and while the technique is actually quite easy when to do.  It's very difficult to get real good looking roses.  I have a new found respect people I see that pipe these things out perfectly in like 10 seconds.  I thought my roses turned out OK, but it's definitely something I need to practice on.  

  
     I bought some piping gel to add to the frosting to try to smooth it out, but I'm not sure how much it really helped.  You can tell that the edges still tore while I was trying to pipe the icing.  You'll also notice my shell border bleeds colors.  I just really love the way the blended colors look and I'll need to do another set of cupcakes and show how I blended different colors for the topping.  They turned out really cool looking.  I also want to try striping my bag with color to see how that looks.  When my teacher tried to teach me the method at class, it didn't turn out so hot.

Stats:

• 8" round cake
• Duncan Hines Yellow Cake Mix. (BT?)
• Wilton Buttercream icing
• Shell Border
• Topped with Wilton Roses

FTW:

• Wilton Rose Badge Earned! 
• Blended Shell Border
• My favorite shade of red thus far.

FTL:

• Frosting for roses split even with piping gel.
• Roses need lots of practice.

    The rose class rejuvenated my desire to bake again!  I'm already planning out a Super Bowl Cake for sunday.  I don't have a particular team in the game, so it will be neutral, but I'll looking forward to seeing what I can come up with!