Monday, May 3, 2010

Sweet Satisfaction

I certainly have been caught off guard by this new found love for baking and decorating cakes. Who'd have thought this sweet line of sugar art would frost me with such sublime satisfaction? Not me. But it has.

I just wanted to make my cakes look pretty, and more importantly I wanted to surprise my parents this coming August by making their 50th Anniversary cake. Well, after seeing my first few cakes, my mom calls me up and asks, "So are you gonna make our cake for our anniversary?" That was her way of saying that what she had seen meant I was qualified!

My love of baking cakes started when I was 12. In 1973 my parents were celebrating their 13th Anniversary and I was trying to figure out how to make it special. I found a box of chocolate cake mix in the pantry and read the directions. My mom was at work that day and  voila, it began.

It turned out pretty good, but it just looked like a chocolate cake with some icing on it (that's all I knew how to do!). I found some plastic "Cinderella and Prince" cake figures that had topped some of my own cakes in the past and put the pair on top of the cake. I then scrounged through drawers and found orange and white crepe paper rolls left over from some Westlawn Junior High School project, and began streaming them from the dining room light. The scene was set for romance I'm sure! Well it was in my 12-year-old mind anyway.

I loved making that cake and when my mom came home, she was certainly surprised!

I made their anniversary cakes for years, but as I got older, I got interested in other things. But I always come back to making cakes and forget how much I really like it.

So this year, as their 50th Anniversary began rolling around, I wondered how I could make their cake special and make it look pretty. I found Wilton cake decorating classes at Michael's in Rockwall and tomorrow, I start course 2 of 4 one-month-long courses.

As I learn each step, I fall more and more in love with this sugar art, and I think that is what attracts me to it. I can get my creative juices flowing. There is an end, a completion to the cake. Unlike writing, where I continue to tweak and edit and re-write, cake decorating has a finality to it. I like that.

My goal is to not only make it look pretty, but to taste good too. I'm on a quest.