Pineapple mousse & Wilton 1-Class 4

Yay! I'm done with course 1 of the Wilton series. In this last class, we finally learned to pipe rose petals as well as bows, leaves, and sweet peas. The roses were a little challenging initially and mine started off lopsided, but they got better after the first couple, once I stopped over-thinking the piping and the angles. My icing was a little stiff which resulted in the ruffled edges, but I prefer to think that they looked rustic...go ahead, just tilt your head and squint your eyes a little, you'll think the same too. This first course was a lot of fun and I definitely learned the basics. We were also fortunate that our instructor was such a nice lady - she got us to come in an hour early for this class so that we would have extra time on the roses. Now, I'm really looking forward to taking the next course with her on making flowers with royal icing.

For this last class, I baked Betty Crocker's French Vanilla cake, and layered it with pineapple mousse that I made - yummy (recipe to follow)! I was actually quite surprised with the boxed mix. I tried it out because everyone in class was saying such good things about it, although I was still skeptical and was expecting a chemical aftertaste; surprisingly, there was none. I also finally got to use my cake leveler, which really simplified the levelling and torting of my cake - such a great tool! In addition, a key lesson that I learned about frosting is that you should invert your cake so that the smooth bottom of the cake becomes the top that gets frosted - this way, there are no crumbs to worry about...yes, I'm truly a novice in cake decorating. It still took me over an hour to frost the cake, but that's because I'm very anal.

There was one thing that annoyed me...Wilton's "Red-Red" and "Christmas-Red" icing gels (I tried both) did not produce a red colour - they just turned my icing pink!  And, the more colouring I added, the more neon-ish the icing turned! I played around with combinations of other colours, but had trouble deriving the colour I wanted for my roses and gave up after my biceps/triceps starting feeling sore...maybe I'll try burgundy in the future.

Okay, so now for my pineapple mousse recipe. Although I used it to layer my cake, this would make a great stand-alone, summery dessert - very simple and delicate.

Ingredients:

1 can pineapple tidbits - drain away the juice and blend ~ I got 1 cup of purée (I would suggest leaving in some chunks for texture)

1/2 cup condensed milk

3/4 cup whipping cream - whipped to soft peaks

Method:

1. Stir condensed milk into puréed pineapple bits.



2. Fold in whipped cream.



3. Chill overnight.



A tip we learned in class: to fill cakes with mousse, puddings, etc., create a dam around the perimeter of the cake first with medium-consistency icing to hold the fillings in. Here is a slice of my cake: