baking for fun: Cake decorating

For my birthday, my parents gave me a spot in a 2-hour cake decorating course. It was at a really good cupcake bakery and I was really happy. I got there and the first thing I realized was that I was sooooo much younger than everyone else. Then I realized that there was only one boy there and he was there with his girlfriend. We came in and there were 8 stations. Each station had one turntable, an apron, 2 spatulas, 1 wet towel, 1 PVC pipe, 1 rolling pin, and one cutting/smoothing tool. We put our aprons on and got to work. We went to another table and there were 18 cakes. 6 vanilla, 6 chocolate, and 6 red velvet. We were making double layered cakes. Everyone wanted red velvet. All 6 girls/women got one layer of red velvet and one layer of chocolate. The poor guy, who was busy, got two layers of vanilla. We started by filling and stacking our cakes. I took FOREVER! I was trying to smooth the icing out with my smoothing tool, but I just kept scraping cake away with the icing... So I finally got my cake in the fridge and we start working with fondant. I'we never worked with fondant so I had no clue what to expect. I wanted to cover my cake in purple, but the purple they had was really dull. I ended up mixing purple with hot pink and white to get a really vibrant purple. I got my cake covered and we started decorating. I did my cake with circles in fondant around the sides and I wanted to do swirls on the top. BAD IDEA. I've never piped elaborate details, only swirls on a cupcake, so my swirls really sucked. I scraped them off but there was this giant smear of white icing on-top of my cake :( I decided to try to hide it by piping circles made from stars on-top. It looked great. Until the stars stared to melt and blob... *sigh*... Overall the sides looked 10 times better than the top but I learned a lot today and I had a really great experience. Thanks mom and dad!

See you next time internet! Love Alexa :)