Eggless orange cake, Wilton 1-Class 2, & Valentine's day

I'm pretty sure that I can bake...but, can I decorate? Heck, no! This is why I signed up for the Wilton cake decorating course. After years of grad school and having done surgeries on mice, I thought I possessed the dexterity to do something simple like transfer a pattern onto my cake, outline it, and fill it in - pardon the pun, but I honestly thought it would be a piece of cake. Boy-oh-boy, was I ever wrong!

So, since the second class fell on Valentine's day, our instructor gave us the freedom to bake and decorate anything we desired, instead of having to do the standard rainbow. All the smart ones in class used cookie cutters to outline heart shapes and what not, but I HAD to be more creative...I found a really cute picture of a cupid and decided to transfer that onto my cake. And not just ANY cake from a box - I made an eggless orange cake. The only silver lining from this whole experience was the cake - it was a recipe I adapted from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (VCTOtW) and once again, it hadn't failed me. The recipe was very straight-forward and the cake was light and spongy with the perfect amount of citrus-ness.



This could get to be a very long post, so I won't detail all my mishaps, just a few highlights. I hardly got any height out of my cake because the 9-inch square pan was a bit too big for the amount of batter I had. So, the frosted cake looked like it lacked any 3-dimensional strucutre - just a big white mass. Then, in class, the piping gel that I used to trace my picture onto parchment did absolutely nothing to my cake (it's supposed to cause indentations on the frosting to help with the outlining of the picture). So, while the rest of the class managed to finish decorating their cakes in the given hour, I was still struggling to transfer my image. I ended up having to bring everything back home, where I had to hide from PT (because I really wanted that big ta-da factor), and after three tries, gave up and did some free-hand drawing. (I was so exhausted from this ordeal that I skipped the bow & arrow.)



Two hours later, shoulders and back aching (I was sprawled on the floor trying to finish this off) but beaming with pride, I presented it to PT, who took one look at it and said, "Awww...is that a monkey?" Argghhh!!!

And the mess...sigh...it took me 2 days to clean everything up. Oh yes, and the Wilton buttercream icing - it's disgusting! It's ALL shortening! I didn't want to play around with the recipe for class, but my MIL, who bakes professionally for a select clientele, suggested a combination of shortening and butter to cut down on the grease. Gotta look into this...



Anyway, so here is the original picture, my buttercream magnus opum, and the eggless orange cake recipe.





Well, I hope all of you had a wonderful Valentine's Day! I'm also sending this along to Confessions of a Bake-a-holic's Bake-a-Cake event.