My (Um) Masterpiece?

After I had my 5,000 supplies packed up for my cake decorating class I was on my way. Of course this was also including 3 tupperware dishes (filled with 2 types of icing and cake filling) and my second batch of cakes. Yes, I had to make two rounds of cakes cakes. My first cake literally caved in and then also fell apart when I was taking it out of the pan so that was clearly not going to work well for purposes of decorating. Since I was planning to make a St. Patrick's Day themed cake, I thought I would go with my Guinness Cupcake recipe for the cake batter, I'm thinking that using egg whites instead of eggs was a bad idea. So then at 4:00 I ran down to A&P quick and picked up box cake mix, and eggs, and proceeded to make those, thankfully the second batch turned out well.

Before class started I ran out into the store to pick up more supplies that I didn't get the previous week. So now I'm in like $22.50 for the class, $44 for the first round of supplies, another $20 on supplies that night plus box cake mix and eggs another $7 or so and forget about all the confectioners sugar, crisco and other supplies I bought before, I estimate I'm in this close to $100 now, but anyway, on to the decorating part...

The first hour or so of class it felt like was purely setting up all the supplies, getting the icing into bags, making the colors, putting together the cake, icing that and practicing the strokes. Finally about an hour later we were ready to get down to business. I had brought a shamrock stencil with me, turns out this shamrock was huge in terms of filling it in. By one leaf of the clover my hand hurt, by the time I made it to the second clover I was running out of steam. Apparently I pressed too hard on my icing bag because the tip of it came off, so there went that color bag, and I wasn't about to transfer that color to another bag and start that process all over again. Instead I decided to move onto another icing color, a lighter shade of green, which resulted in my multicolored green shamrock.

Before we knew it the two hour class period had elapsed and I was still at it just trying to finish my poor multicolored shamrock. Meanwhile everyone else in the class had finished their design and iced the edges and their cake and made it look pretty, I could barely finish my shamrock but I eventually made it, two and a half hours later. When I showed Mike he said it looked good and I was being too critical. It did look good but I was disappointed it was two colors and I didn't get to even finish it.

I am happy to report that I took the cake to work with me on Wednesday and it was a huge hit. I went home with only one slice left, which Mike had. The cake was really good, with how much sugar and crisco was in it, how could it be bad. It also didn't hurt that the middle of the cake was a chocolate turtle pudding made with heavy cream and I added a teaspoon of baileys which gave it an even better taste.

I didn't have a chance to take good pictures of the cake since I was in a rush to leave for the office but you can get the idea. Here's my shamrock cake: