So, two weeks ago I went to the second classes for Courses 2 and 3 (on separate nights). It was fun, but... I just sucked. My classmates were turning out lovely gum paste roses, but my spaghetti would break before I got past the third petal, and things weren't looking too good before that. My calla lily was okay, but am I the only person who dislikes the yellow sparkles? In Course 2, my apple blossoms and primroses were trashed whenever I got to the last petal. Every time. "So easy!" said the comments on the Wilton site. My rosebuds flopped flat.
There are no pictures from either of these classes.
Last week started out just as poorly. My daisy edges were too ragged to ignore. The sparkles still looked stupid. The mum, which I didn't think looked so pretty in the book, turned out gorgeous and full-bodied in the hands of others... mine looked like a crumpled mash of triangles that didn't quite cover the base. (My spaghetti continued to break.) Then we did the carnations (postponed to this week because we decided not to waste a lot of fondant just covering cake boards), and everyone hated them. While I had to push down memories of junior high dances gone awry, I sort of liked mine. AT LAST!
But then I got home and compared them to how gum paste carnations should look. Sigh. (It's not obvious in this carefully angled photo, but my carnations all have big gaps at the top.)
Then the next night my luck sort of turned. Sort of. I couldn't get anything out of Tip 1, despite several cleanings, to the point where my bag (disposable, not even parchment) burst rather than push the icing through, so my violets (such as they were) didn't have any signature dots. I had almost as much trouble with Tip 3, so my daffodil centers were half-assed and more likely to have a Silly String-like moment of Pollackization across the top than a tight zig-zag. I over-petaled my roses until the instructor caught me and told me when to stop. (I also did an up-and-down shake movement on the petals instead of a rainbow movement, having misunderstood the directions, until she intervened. Which is why I now despair of being able to just follow the book and online instructions in order to continue my education.)
But when I changed icing (having run out of purple from over-petaling the roses), I ended up with what I thought were some very pretty white/purple roses. Ragged edges, yes - I can't seem to avoid that regardless of whether it's buttercream, royal icing, or gum paste - but nice. And my daffodil petals could be worse. The lily petals came out too thick and not defined enough, but they have so many visual components that photos of them are rather forgiving.
With practice, there's hope.
So my mood was much improved, and who knows what would've happened if I hadn't caught a red-eye to DFW a few hours later to spend four days helping my dad deal with my grandmother's stuff. (But then, because it's Texas, I was bitten by the usual "things no can see and certainly no one else is bitten by" whatevers multiple times, and between that, the humidity, and legs swollen either from the plane or the couple of dozen bites that itched like a mofo and made my skin raggedy and scabbed even when I didn't scratch, I ended up lying around a lot and feeling tired and crap, which always happens if I don't visit during the autumn/winter. Trying to sort out Dad's computer issues - ultimately revealed to be local AT&T U-Verse issues - was wearing as well. As was the emotional nature of pulling apart my grandparents' photo albums so my cousins could have all the pics in which they appear.)
ANYway, whine-whine-whine aside, I came home around midnight on Monday. I was at home all day Tuesday to recover and also to get the preparations for the final cakes of Courses 2 and 3 done.
I tried. I did.
I made eight mini-cakes, my original plan being to do two different designs - one with carnations and one with daisies.
Then I decided to make just one design and use the other stack of mini-cakes for the Course 2 final, since I've heard that basketweave is very tiring on the hands, and I don't have the greatest hand strength to begin with.
I made Bunnywoman buttercream and immediately regretted it. Yeah, it tastes better (although still not as good as non-decorating buttercreams), but apparently I'm the only person in the entire world who finds it just too soft to do anything nice with it. I even cut the water this time (from 1/3 to 1/4c) so it wouldn't be so floppy.
I iced both cakes. The one for Course 3 didn't have to be pretty because it was being covered in fondant. I decided to do yellow for the Course 2 cake so I could have yellow basketweave, yellow daffodils, and purple "I don't know whats, but I know I have a lot of them." Yeah... see, I decided to practice the apple blossom at home? But I grabbed the wrong template? And I ended up making a bag of icing's worth of six-petaled instead of five-petaled flowers? And the last petal was still ruined on each one? Yeah...
But the yellow icing looked terrible - again with the deviled egg look. I used too much yellow. And the Bunnywoman buttercream was just a soft mess. Worse than last time. I ended up getting all Richard Dreyfuss-meets-Demi Moore and shaping it over the cake with my hands.
Then an hour later I decided it was too ugly to live and that I still had enough white buttercream to do it over before the last class. I scraped it all off. It's wrapped in a soft ball on the kitchen counter. I don't know what to do with it.
And all of the above is the short version. I'm not even getting into stabbling myself with an X-acto knife when I tried - twice - to make a cake circle small enough for my mini-cake.
So now it's the next day, the day of the final class for Course 3. (Final class for Course 2 is tomorrow.)
I really don't want to go.
I've been up-and-down for 24 hours now of talking myself into going. "You've come this far." "Your flowers are plenty cute even if they're not what you want yet." "You always learn something." "You won't get the certificate of completion if you don't go in and complete the class."
(The 4.0 student in me gets twitchy over that last one.)
I haven't made any preparation. I have this vague idea of putting carnations on top of the cake with the "embellished rope border" at the bottom. I wanted to do fondant leaves going down the sides (like in the book), but I can't do them in advance because I only have one pack of white fondant, and I won't know how much is left over until I cover the cake.
I know I've done this to myself: two classes at once (although I had time for both, so that's not an excuse), trip to Texas right beforehand (although I had ample time yesterday to make any decorations, and really - since I made mini-cakes - I have plenty of flowers already), the critical eye that is less forgiving of myself than of others.
But right now the thought of packing up all the cake stuff (which is EVERYwhere - Mike will be back from Australia soon and I don't even know where to begin putting it since I commandeered his clutter drawer and the space around the appliances he uses) and going to class to make something that I won't really like and won't want to eat (shelf-stable fondant? hard gum paste?) has zero appeal.
Then part of me says, "You did NOT fill up the kitchen with all kinds of cake decorating paraphernalia only to miss the final classes and not even get the certificates."
But I think I have. I know I can make up the classes another time, and the instructor is super-nice, but the thought of doing this anymore makes me wrinkle my nose and want to just shut down. I don't mean cake decorating, although I have no reason to make or decorate cakes other than for class or practicing for class, just the class. But let's face it: not being a natural at cake decorating and not having a reason in real life to decorate cakes doesn't bode well for taking this further.
I tell myself, "That's fine. You had a lot of fun for awhile and learned a lot. You always wanted to do it and, despite never learning to cover a cake in fondant or do a basketweave in the last classes, you did. Don't go if it makes you miserable. Geez, woman. Lighten up."
But I don't want to feel this way. I want to be excited about cake class, like I usually am. I find myself wondering if I'm having a bit of an unexpected existential crisis brought on by Mimi's death, ending my career with the school district, and sorting out what my next identity will be. Is tonight a case of "life's too short to force myself to do a hobby when I'm not in the mood," or is it more like, "what's the point of it all?"
I don't know. Maybe I'll try to do the lesson for the last class on my own, from the book, for funsies... and never mind that the Roomba's brush cage is stuck and I can't seem to keep up with the other housework and the hammies are all getting old with a variety of tumours and oddities and I can't seem to eat a meal that didn't begin in the freezer and I keep forgetting to take my gummy vitamins and I can't think of any cool ideas to help Mike with his student teaching observations this week and I can't find anything good to read (The Alchemyst isn't quite cutting it for me) and I'm covered in scabs and my legs are swollen and my scabs all itch and I'm still fat and will I ever even find more ancestors unless Who Do You Think You Are flies me around the globe (and even then) and that show really promotes some bad genealogy practices, doesn't it? and my ankle hurts and my "Wakey Cakey" alarm (in case I napped) has been going off for 15 minutes straight while I type this and I know I'm a silly billy and as soon as I get some dusting and other errands done and stop using so much polysyndeton in this paragraph, I'll be my frisky self again.
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