Just Say No to Clowns

As one embarks on a new business idea it’s important for that individual to assess their strengths and weaknesses in order to build on the weaknesses, right? So that’s what I decided to do with regard to cake/pastry decorating. I’m self-taught and it shows. So I searched and searched for some sort of ‘legitimate’ pastry class (remember, I am a food snob so a legitimate class would be offered by the French Pastry Institute or the Culinary Institute of America) but of course this is Columbus, Ohio so I am left with very few choices – namely the Wilton cake decorating classes offered at Joann Fabrics and Michaels Craft Stores. *sigh*

Now Wilton is a fine company that has been teaching amateur home bakers how to decorate their kids’ birthday cakes for decades. They even get pretty advanced in their wedding cake courses. But let us all remember why Lindi is here. To differentiate her business from the character cake (Sponge Bob is a popular cake character these days) and the wedding cake markets. We’re going for upscale gourmet fare here, right? Right!

So you can imagine my internal strife last night as I endured the week 1 demonstration on how to make the “Wilton Recipe” frosting. First you take a cup of Crisco (cringe), 2 cups of Powdered Sugar (ok, breathe), 1 tsp of Wilton Vanilla flavoring (wince), ½ tsp of Wilton Butter Flavoring (the bile begins to rise)…you get the picture.

My visceral reaction is due to the fact that this one frosting recipe goes against the core of my cake baking being. I use the highest quality ingredients in my cakes. No shortening to be found. No imitation this, artificial that. It is painfully obvious that this course (and the Wilton method) is all about how a cake looks – not how it tastes. (Well, it’s also about selling us $150 worth of Wilton product too.) So I found myself having an internal dialog that sounded something like this:

“Ok you just need to play along with this part of it so that you can learn the decorating skills. Forget about what’s in the cake for once – you’re focusing on learning the principles of decorating here.”

I took a lot of deep breaths.

So the assignments over the course of the class will be to bake and base-frost a cake per week at home, and bring them in to class to decorate. I will most certainly photograph my progress for your enjoyment. The decorating part should be fun if I can put aside my snobbishness about the ingredients.

I will have another dilemma when it comes to the finished cakes. They will not live up to my quality standards taste-wise – so what should I do with them? I will be using boxed mixes (sacrilege!) since I don’t want to waste my precious ingredients on a cake that will be topped with shortening-based frosting. I suppose I can bring them to work and caveat their existence with a disclaimer about it being a decorating exercise. After all….some of these people are my clients, and all of them have tasted lots of my cakes. I have a reputation to uphold.

Ok, enough snootiness. Well….maybe not.

Oh yeah, the clowns. So I was looking over the materials list and under week 4 it says that we need to purchase “2 Small Derby clown heads”. I got a good laugh out of that since I took a vow early on in life that I would never feature a clown in any of my cooking or baking or decorating, or clothing. Basically I just denounced clowns in general. Anyway the assignment for week 4 is to make this cake. Check out the photo. Scary, huh? Maybe I'll be sick. Oh wait! I have book club that night!!! Yay!!