by Rebecca Jun 15th, 2011 // Desserts

Competitive Cake Decorating

Last week I flew to Wilton Corporate Headquarters for a blogger workshop. On the way, I bought two trashy magazines for the plane and learned who is too fat, who is too skinny and who has a pregnancy bump but has not copped to it. Oh, and also Brad and Jen had a secret phone call that Angelina doesn’t know about yet. (Doh! Did I just reveal that secret information?)

After a very enlightening flight, I had a lovely meal with an old friend / coworker in downtown Oak Park at the Marion Street Cheese Market before heading further out to the burbs for the conference. Shortly after I arrived at the hotel it started hailing. Then a fierce thunder storm ensued… this was just the thing I needed to be lulled to sleep. Except, not. It totally kept me up all night long! I had some trouble dragging my tired ass out of bed, but the promise of butter cream was pretty powerful.

You know how sometimes you wish that your job was full of cupcakes and rainbows? That’s basically the conference room at Wilton. Except substitute rainbows for a super nice, incredibly patient grandma-type lady who teaches you how to decorate cakes.

This lady, who is was the head of the Wilton School, is amazing with a pastry bag. She whipped us into shape and then sent us on a tour of the decorating studio. Check out all the different display dishes they had. There were walls and walls of props. Dreamy.

I’m glad I didn’t nod off during any of the instruction because when we returned to the room they broke us up into teams and announced a cake decorating competition! We had one hour, a dummy cake and bags of butter cream and other decorating options.

That’s our cake. The one in pink. Our strategy was to do something clever (a charm bracelet with everyone’s name on it as a charm and the Wilton logo at the top of the cake) instead of competing on decorating ability. Every other team referred to our cake as the “brown noser cake.” Nice.

There were 9 teams competing and when the buzzer went off, they whisked us away to the Wilton Tent Sale (hey, I’m not complaining) while they judged the cakes. Wondering who won?

Here’s a wide shot of all the cakes. Pretty impressive for a bunch of (mostly) novice cake decorators who had only an hour to decorate and had only just learned the techniques.

Our “brown noser” cake won the “Most Original” award from the fine folks at Wilton. They said they “liked how the cake represented that we are all connected in the chain of cake decorating” and that we had the “best use of the Wilton logo.” Yeah, ours was the ONLY use of the Wilton logo. Hmmmm… does sound a little brown-nosey, doesn’t it?! Before you go, be sure to check out Cookies and Cups – that the blog that my new pal Shelly (pictured here) runs. It is guaranteed to make your mouth water.