THIS TAKES THE CAKE, THE COOKIE AND THE CUPCAKE

Since I've gotten cable, the high cable numbers representing mostly reality programs, have gotten me hooked again with all of those cooking shows.

Watching all of those baking shows have amazed me at the way the cake designers work.

First, I ask myself, what is the difference between fondant, gum paste and now, molding chocolate?  On one show, they keep mentioning cereal treats and use it as a mold under fondant and frosting.  But how do you make the huge slabs of that stuff?  It looks like most of the "cake" is made from that, wood, screws, and PVC pipe.

I've always wanted to take a cake decorating class, so I have  watched closely how they create certain elements and what tools they use to do that.  It got me so interested, I finally went down to Walmart and Michaels to get some things to try out.  I went overboard with my purchases; i.e., starter decorating kit, heart shaped cookie cutters, fondant and heart shaped cake pans.
 
I checked out Wilton's cake decorating web page and found a chocolate cookie recipe to decorate.  I made the heart shaped cookies yesterday.  I only rolled out half of the recipe because it was a very hard dough to roll out and my arms started to get tired.  I did eat one of the undecorated cookies.  They're OK.  They're the hard, crunchy type, so decorating on them will be a breeze, since I don't think I'll be using the fondant I bought.  

I bought a 25 piece Wilton's decorating set which had instructions, five tips, couplers, a bunch of pastry bags and the four major colors of their food coloring.  Their buttercream frosting recipe on the internet had vegetable shortening in it.  I don't like baked items with this ingredient in them, so I went to Cooks.com which has buttercream recipe without this greasy tasting (I think) ingredient in it.  I'm making the butter soften right now and later on, this rainy day, I'll make the frosting and put my talents to the test, first, of course, by practicing on a cutting board.

Wilton's has a class at Michaels with 40% off.  I meant to ask about it, but in my excitement to get home to read instructions and start baking the next day, I forgot about it by the time I got to the check out line.

I'll let you know how these decorating attempts turned out.  In the past, I've only decorated with smearing frosting or preserves on top and the sprinkling of candies, but with these shows on TV challenging me to see if I could do just some of the beginning techniques, I'm anxious to find out.  If there  are really any great looking, I might even show a photo or two of them.

Wish me luck.