1969 Wilton Cake Decorating

Ah, 1969. A good year. :) I volunteer at the local library's book store. It's a great place to find books for CHEAP prices (10 cents up to $3) that you don't have to return or worry about late fines.

Cleaning books, pricing and shelving them is fun, especially when we get first dibs on the books we're processing. Imagine my surprise when this passes through my hands.

"Modern Cake Decorating," by Wilton; 6th Edition published in 1969. The cover's not the greatest, but the book itself is in great shape.

I LOVE looking at it. Some of the designs are so dated they make me laugh aloud, but for the most part, a lot of the tricks and lessons are the same 41 years later.

Today, we're mortified is we can't get a super-smooth finish on cakes. Check these ones below out.

Hee hee!

The also show some neat borders and designs I've never seen before.

There's the rose.

There's a detailed section on making figures with royal icing.

My son saw this and begged me to find the pans and legs, etc. Yes, they are available on E-bay. No, I will not be paying $50-$85 for it, but it's pretty awesome, no?

Here is another display of making figures with royal icing.

I am excited about owning this book. Total cost?

$1.00

I love the library book store.

Cake fall down, go boom!

I decided to make a chocolate cake. I went with a recipe from the 500 Cakes book I bought a few months back. All was going well.


Isabel insisted I be "Tasha" of the Backyardigans. She colored the mask herself.

I filled the pan with batter and put it in the oven. About 35 minutes later, I smell burning from the oven. The cake was overflowing over the sides and batter had fallen on the hot elements. Great. I overfilled the pan and now I have to clean the oven.

After over an hour, I opened the oven and this happened.






Foom! Implosion. I have never ever had that happen. Weird. I heard people talk about it in cake class, but this was a first. I guess since I overfilled the pan, the center was just not getting cooked. What a waste.

Nothing Fancy but It's Good

I purchased this book. Not sure why I blogged about it on my regular blog though. You can get caught up there.



I decided on making a Coffee & Praline Layer cake. I won't give the recipe, due to copyright yada yadas. Go buy the book. It's good and low priced on Amazon. I'm just trying to find good cake recipes for underneath my fun cake projects.






The cakes themselves were not too difficult to make.





While the cakes cooled, I made homemade praline. Note to self: MELTED SUGAR IS MOLTEN LAVA! Holy SMOKES!!






This was my first time working with mascarpone (NOT MaRscapone, MaScarpone). It was very easy to work with and really bland, until you added the powdered sugar. This above was colored this way due to adding coffee to it, and was only half-way done. There was more sugar to be added, which thickened it up.

The bottom cake was iced, another layer stacked on top, both cakes were iced, the home-made praline was cracked and sprinkled on top and voilà ! [It's not "Wahhlahh", people. (Yes, I saw that written like that fairly recently.) It's French and basically means, Look There! Voi from Voir (look or see) and La (there). Look There! voilà !]

The coffee icing was excellent, the cake was firm but not dry. Great cake recipe, but if you're a coffee-hater, this one's not for you.