The Nifty Foodie

I’ve never seen Hobby Lobby have a no limit sale on their Wilton products before, so when I saw this coupon, I knew I had to stock up!

Since I’m about to take Course 3, I decided to stock up on some essentials before the class starts next Friday.

It’s been a while…ahh. Can you believe I got all this for $25?? Yeah…feeling awesome right now! I’m very excited about Course 3!

This sale is going on until July 4th, fellow Wilton-ers, so if you need to stock up, now is definitely the time!

I’ve taken Wilton classes before. In fact, I took Course 1 (Easter Cake, TGIF cake, Final Cake), Course 2 (Final Cake) and Fondant/Gumpaste (Gumpaste flowers, Final cake). I skipped Course 3 because I was afraid of tiered cakes. It’s a fear I have and plus, how the HECK do I pawn off so much cake?

I decided to just take the class. I’m getting very rusty in my skills and could use a fun refresher to get me ready for some upcoming cake fun.

I’m very excited about this course!

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Here’s what it covers according to Wilton:

Reach a new level of decorating sophistication with the beautiful flowers and techniques in Course 3. Begin with intricate accents such as embroidery and lace, stringwork, garland and ruffle borders. Discover the beauty of decorating with rolled fondant — for covering cakes with an immaculate smooth surface and shaping fun figures and elegant flowers. Add several new icing flowers to your repertoire, including lovely holiday blooms like poinsettias and Easter lilies. Complete your course by assembling and decorating a towering tiered cake with beautiful stringwork, flowers and borders.

Stay tuned next month for some fun new cakes! And a neat (hopefully) cake decorating surprise too!

I haven’t touched royal icing in months. There was a reason though. My hand mixer had settings of fast and faster. It really grated my nerves when I had to make this icing, because it would result in large powdered sugar clouds that took over my kitchen, resulting in the need to REALLY clean our kitchen. (I’m talking on my hands and knees because the floor was so sticky!)

So, now I have my precious KA mixer from my grandmother as a wedding gift. I was mentioning to my best friend that I needed a reason to bake, because I really wanted to break my mixer in. She said I could make her sugar cookies (she was joking). I wasn’t — so I now have the task of making her 2 dozen breast cancer awareness cookies.

Let’s just say icing making in the KA mixer is a DREAM. In fact, it’s making me want to enroll in Wilton Course 3, to finish off the series. (I took 1, 2 and 4 already…there are cake examples in this blog if you’re interested!)

I used my no-fail recipe from the ever-so-wonderful Cookie Craft book. I don’t like to share recipes out of books, because of potential copyright infringement. I don’t want to get in any kind of trouble here!

However, just to let you know, I highly recommend this to anyone needing inspiration and ideas for making pretty rolled cookies. I used the royal icing recipe from the Wilton website.

Pardon my icing skills, by the way, I’m VERY rusty!

Wish me luck on shipping these bad boys to Dallas. I’m going to be using some tips that I starred from The Hyper Homemaker’s blog (which is no longer up, sadly, but will always be handy in my Google reader!).

My fiance’s nephew just turned 3 years old, and for his birthday, I volunteered to make cookie favors. His favorite animal (of the moment) is an elephant, so I went on the search for an elephant cookie cutter. I found a great set called “Noah’s Ark” at Macy’s that had an elephant. Then, I used the standard Betty Crocker sugar cookie mix (remember I’m still on the search for that PERFECT cookie recipe, so in the meantime, I use my trusty mix) and went to town!

This is the first time I worked with flood icing, so I think I did pretty well considering! I’m now ready to make fun Christmas cookies using my experience with the icing!

As you can see, my work is nowhere near perfect, but the kids loved them!

…what goodies would you get?

I’ve taken 3 Wilton classes so far, and somewhere in there I got randomly selected to take a survey for a gift certificate for Wilton goodies! Originally, it was $20, which was generous! However, when I got my form in, they gave me $30 to cover shipping/taxes!! SCORE!!

So, I wanted some fun goodies and useful things as well. If I could, I’d get all sprinkles because those are just fun! However, I wanted some useful items I could use in my decorating too. I ended up getting a hybrid of both…check out the stash!

* Bake Even Strips
* Flower Lifter
* Candy Dipping Set
* White Sparkling Sugars
* White Nonpareils

I’m so excited about using the Bake Even Strips, especially, because I’m making my future nephew in law (I guess you can say)…a TIERED birthday cake full of elephants and jungle fun. So, I think these little strips will come in handy, and even though I haven’t taken tiered cakes yet, I have a feeling I can handle stacking two cakes. I have the instructions after all…how hard can it be?