Private lessons!

I'm really excited to have scheduled my first private instruction session with a lovely gal named Mary here in Yuma, who has been dabbling in cakes for a few years and desperately wants to push herself over the edge in to higher end decorating. I had a look at some of her work, asked her what she struggles with most, and what she spends the most time on during the process of creating her custom cakes. From Mary's answers, I came up with three things that we'll focus on when we get together.

The first thing we'll tackle is smoothing the butter cream perfectly flat and even all around the cake, like this: This step is so critically important if you want your fondant to look smooth, bump free and achieve a clean top edge all the way around.Here's a good example of clean and even edges on the bottoms of the tiers also. My client struggles with pleats and jagged edges on her cakes, which is something that rears it's ugly head with me on occasion as well.

While I was chatting with her (and I have her permission to share this with you), she said something I was not expecting to hear. She wishes she had learned to slow down and pay attention to areas like these a long time ago, instead of jumping straight into the decorating part. She says she was seduced by the cake shows on tv, and encouraged by well meaning family/friends and thought it would be easy to do cakes like that herself. She realizes the areas of work we'll be focusing on are not really the fun parts of the business, but are some of the ones that truly make a cake beautiful. Yes! I couldn't agree more!! I'll take a perfectly plain but flawlessly finished cake any day over a hot sloppy mess that has pretty decorations. She's tired of her "okay" work, and wants "fabulous" work! Oh, we'll fix that Mary, we will fix that!

I can't wait to meet with Mary and show her some of the tricks I've learned over the years, and demonstrate a few that I have come up with on my own. If you have some things you struggle with as well, give me a call or shoot me an e-mail and we'll chat about scheduling a private lesson.