There was a time when I was so determined to learn how to properly decorate a cake that I woke up early on Saturday mornings, sometimes still drunk, to get to my Wilton cake decorating class at the Queens Michael’s store. I imagine that someday I will tell young people the tales of my early three-quarter-mile walks with pounds of pastries and mixed buttercream on my back. Oh, the sacrifices I made so an engaging, flamboyant cake decorator from New Jersey could teach me how to make iced roses while I pretended I wasn’t about to fall asleep in a pile of cupcakes! Because those are the stories kids like to hear, right?

I must say, I rarely use the skills I learned in that basic class. I probably should have taken more $22.50 Wilton classes, but Saturday mornings just weren’t my thang. I personally think all one needs to make beautifully-decorated pastries is decent tools and some imagination. Example: Can’t a frost a cake evenly? Frost as evenly as you can, then apply pressure to the cake with the flat side of a butter knife tip and pull away. If your frosting is still fresh, it should spike out. Repeat all over and voila, you have a pretty gorgeous, spiky cake without disturbing your perfectionist within.

Seriously, creativity will get you everywhere. My inspiration has most recently been the book Hello, Cupcake! (that I got on sale at Home Goods) and various other Google image searches of tasty treats.

For my nephews’ 2nd and 4th birthdays last week, I made them birthday cupcakes shaped like Thomas the Tank Engine and a dozen dogs.

For the Thomases I made vanilla cupcakes from my cupcake guru Shelly Kaldunski’s Cupcakes book and half a batch of Martha Stewart’s royal icing recipe (which was still way too much icing for this) and tinted them (it takes a lot of patience to get the color you want, adding in dye paste little by little so you don’t over-do it) in five batches: black, blue, grey, red and white (which I didn’t have to mess with, as white”s the icing’s original color. Then I “glued” on the Oreo “wheels” with some more dabs of royal icing and let them sit and dry overnight. Bonus tip: I bought small squeeze bottles (2 for $2.49 at Michael’s) and used them to pipe the royal icing. Awesome, easy control.

As you can see from the tear, it’s hard for small children to have these dangled in their faces while they eat lunch without wanting to touch them. When it comes to dessert, I can relate.

I also made a dozen dogs of three varieties:  chocolate labs, chihuahuas and schnauzers.

All these are a rather simplified version of the original from Hello, Cupcake! Snouts are all marshmallows covered in buttercream, eyes and noses are  royal icing, the floppy brown ears are melted and rolled-out Tootsie Rolls, the Chihuahua ears are Oreos with buttercream piped on and the schnauzers get their body from a mini cupcake sitting on top of a big cupcake.

To make the fur I filled a pastry bag with white buttercream and used a star-shaped decorating tip that looked like it would do the trick and copied what it looked like they did in the picture in the book. This isn’t high-school math, you can copy anyone you please.

I won’t lie: this took a while. I can’t stand the taste of store-bought tub frosting and I’m not a big fan of boxed cake mixes, so I made all the batter, frosting and icing from scratch (if kids are going to eat sweets, why not give them the good stuff?). To learn how to properly use royal icing, which I’ve never made before, I just Googled around for a few tips. Like I said, the Wilton class more helped me not be afraid of using weird ingredients (like meringue powder for the royal icing) than taught me to be a badass with a pastry bag. Anyone can make pretty outstanding dessert decorations with some patience and some research.

In that vein, here are a few good resources for those with questions about the ingredients and how to handle them.

Wilton’s Cake and Dessert Decorating 101 Certainly this is a brand’s Web site, but they kind of have the monopoly of baked-goods doohickeys, so they at least know their stuff.

Baking 911 Whoever made this put a lot of time and love into answering just about any question you could have about baking measurements, techniques, tips, and anything having to do with adding sugar to butter, eggs and flour.

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