Cake 'O The Day

So, I've been taking a Wedding Cake class at Cabrillo.  It's basically 4 full days that are, literally, packed with great demos, and mixing, and baking, and crumb-coating, and making-of-beautiful-things-to-put-on-the-cakes.  Last week I posted a pic of the cake my team made.  This weekend, we made another team-cake on Saturday.  Here it is:

 I highlight the hand made chococate flowers because that was my contribution (that you can see anyway) and since this is my blog and, at least in this little cyberworld, Yes, it's all about me!  There were a lot of things about the final result that I was not happy with, but I'll chalk it up to a good learning experience.  The cake itself was the most delicious chocolate cake with dark chocolate ganache and fresh banana filling.  Yum-O! (name that FN celebrity).  So yesterday (Sunday) was the class final. Each person had to create her own cake from start to finish. Sketch up a drawing and all (note to self:  take an art class.  You cannot draw)  I was very excited to be working on a cake that I could call my own. Ok, so I have issues with working in groups....I'm a work in progress, I guess.  Anyway... here is my final cake:

The end result was quite nice, I think, for my first wedding cake.  There are lots of things I would do differently (and hopefully better), but I did learn a lot through the process.  Mostly I learned that I'm going to have to be a better planner and work faster if I ever want to make any money in the cake business!  Between weekends we had to create a mock-up brochure for pretending we had a cake business.  That was an... interesting exercise.  I discovered that I've had my nose in Excel for too-too many years and desperately need to brush up on my PowerPoint skills.  The most difficult part was coming up with a name for the business.  I went with "Take the Cake", but I'm not completely sold on it.  I mostly used it because I had already spent way too much time working on a name and was quickly running out of time.  Maybe I'll host a contest and make a cake for anyone that comes up with a name I want to use...  future post pending on that...