Sugarcraft Course Week 1

Gary suggested that I write blog posts on my course to keep you all updated. I can't promise that I'll update you each week on my progress on the course but I'll do my best to cover the main points. I decided to do a Sugarcraft course with Greenwich Community College, this is a 20 week course, 2 hours a week, which covers the basics of sugarcraft including piping, flowers and cake decorating. I really wanted to do this course so I could feel more confident in my skills and learn how to do things properly. I want my cakes to look as good as possible and for people to get a professional finish, if people are paying me they should get the best. 

Some of the items I've purchased to help my cake decorating

The course is run on Thursdays during the day so I expected there to be a certain age demographic in the group, I was surprised. When I arrived I discovered that there were just 4 of us in the class. There were a few people left over from the morning intermediate class but only 4 of us doing the beginners class. To start with the teacher told us the basics of what we would need for the class and gave us a demonstration of how to make royal icing. She used icing sugar, water and something called Meri white. This is dried egg whites that can be store at room temperature and therefore last a long time. This is a useful product to know about rather than always having egg whites around, however, it's not something found in the supermarkets so I'm going to have to order some online. The 3 items were put in the mixer and left to it for 9 minutes. 

Meanwhile we learnt how to make piping bags. This is something I've never done before as I've always used ready made so was quite interesting. I'll have to practice but I think I understood the basics. Once the bags were made and the icing complete we learn how to pipe. Piping is something I really wanted to learn so I was pleased that goal 1 was going to be achieved in week 1. We started off just learning how to pipe a straight line, it was much harder than it looked. You need to make sure the tip is clean before you touch the surface and then apply pressure and attach that bit of icing. Lift it from the board, squeezing all the time, and drag it to form a straight line. The trick is moving your hand slowly enough not to split the icing, applying the right pressure so it's even and lifting so you can control the placement better. 

Lines

Once we'd achieved lines we moved on to writing our names. 

Name

Once I'd got the hang of just keeping moving, I was quite pleased with my finished product. We learnt how to do swirls, I found this much harder to achieve and will need more practice on this.

Swirls

Finally dots and a snail trail. I found dots very easy but didn't have much time to explore snail trails.

Spots, snail trail and unjoined up snail trail

 The time in the class went really quickly, I was pleased with the progress I'd made in that class and went away thinking there was much more to practice. Unfortunately I missed week 2 because I was on holiday but I was told that they covered the same ideas with a star nozzle instead. Next week we are piping flowers. My homework between weeks is to make up my own royal icing and practice the previous techniques. The pictures I've put in above are from my home practice rather than from the class. 

My board after practice!!