Cupcake class should grade on a curve

So when I made my list of New Year's resolution and I put on the one (No. 12) about taking a class sometime this year, I was still hopeful that I would get that fellowship I applied for and be auditing awesome classes at Stanford. But since I am not enough of an egghead for Stanford, I had to have a back-up plan.

Last Friday I took a cupcake decorating class. While I like to cook, I am not much for baking. I like to bake and I like to reap the rewards of baking, but I get a little overwhelmed at having to measure everything out precisely and waiting patiently for things to cook. A friend of mine said he likes baking because you just follow the instructions and you can't go wrong. But personally, I find that I can go wrong - and do - all the time. In fact, a few months ago when my mom and I baked a strawberry cake for my aunt's birthday, we improvised a little on the frosting. In the end more frosting ended up on the cake plate than on the actual cake. But I guess we didn't follow the instructions.

The class was offered through the community class offerings at Gavilan Community College. I've taken a few cooking classes and enjoyed them so the cupcake class sounded fun. Last fall, the class was offered and registration booked up before we could get in so this time I rsvp'ed early on.

Penny Perluss, the owner of Pennycakes in Gilroy, teaches the class and she kept it to the basics. Each classmate received six cupcakes - two chocolate, two lemon and two vanilla - and a bag of supplies. We had three types of icing and three basic cake decorating tips, three colors of fondant and a cup of buttercream frosting to share. We also had a square sheet of plastic on which to practice our designs before putting them onto the cupcakes.

The first design was a daisy, with a green leaf, pink petals and a yellow center. The petals and center were easy enough. The tough part was getting the leaf tip to look like a leaf and not like a snack or random squiggle. It was a bit frustrating. After practicing, we did the design on our first cupcake and then practiced on one more. It was surprising to see how much better the second one looked than the first. For the next cupcake, we practiced a design with three dainty flowers. This design required use of a 5 or 4 point tip, and as it turns out, it requires a lot of pressure to push thick icing through a small hole. My arms got tired doing it. We also made a sunflower design, with the leaf tip, which I found the hardest to use. My sunflower looked a bit saggy compared to the one Perluss did as an example. But as she said at the beginning of the class, there's no doing anything wrong in cupcake decorating. I am sure, however, if the work were graded, I would definitely be below the curve.

I was pretty good with following along - as long as someone was telling me what tip to do and where to put things. But at the end, Perluss let us loose to play around with fondant, with only the guideline to create three different flowers. For anyone who doesn't know, fondant is sort of like surgary play-doh. It doesn't taste good and it gets really sticky if you handle it too much.

During the "free design" period of the class, I noticed that some of the other people in the class were doing extravegant or elegant designs. I was just trying to get three flowers done to meet the requirement of the teacher - even though this was a non-credit class. I made one flower that the teacher described as a mosaic, with petals and leaves shaped the way I used to make them when I'd doodle on my notebooks in class. Then I just made a simple flower with circles and a stem. For the last piece, I made a toadstool, but unfortunately the fondant cap was too heavy for the fondant stem so it kind of fell over.

While I probably will not work with fondant again, if I ever bake a cake I might try to use some of the design tools to make borders or flowers or stars. It was easy enough and it might make people think I actually know what I am doing when it comes to baked goods.

The best part of the class was eating a cupcake when I got home - although half a dozen was a bit too much for one so most of those went to waste. The worst part was my hands still smelling like buttercream and vanilla the next day. Apparently vanilla extract can get under your skin just as much as garlic.

Photos by Melissa Flores

A cupcake is decorated with pink and yellow flowers.

Fondant can be used to mold decorations, such as this toadstool.