Tutorial Tuesday: IRL

You won’t be learning much in today’s edition because I took this Tuesday to do an in real life Tutorial Tuesday! My friend Kevin is awesome, he’s done two of my three baking related tattoos and I’ve known him since he used to make lattes for a living before he became like one of the coolest tattoo artists ever.
Also, he has two of the cutest kids I’ve ever met. Well, they were kids… and now they’re like… these crazy sort of grown up looking people. I don’t really know how this happens because last time I saw his daughter I think she was reading me a Dora the Explorer book and she came over today and was as tall as I am. Haha. Parents, stop letting your children grow up! It’s making me feel old!

Anyhow, Eros is 13. Almost 14, as it turns out. And she loves Ace of Cakes. She watches it like crazy and she’s obsessed with cake decorating. She’s been rolling play dough over tin cans as her practice, which, I think, is pretty darn adorable. Now, when I first started, I also loved Ace of Cakes. I didn’t know where or how to get started. Then I helped a good friend with an art project by helping her illustrate a children’s book she wrote. I didn’t ask anything in return, but I came home to a package in the mail… it was this:

Just a few little things to get me started… and look how far I’ve come!
So, I made her a little starter kit!

Just a few things to get her started, icing spatula, some silicone spatulas, pizza cutter, pastry brush, measuring cup, couplers, 4 icing tips, three different kinds of sprinkles and I made her some fondant to play with.

I’m also passing on the two decorating books I started with. They were a great inspiration to me when I got them and I know they’ll be a great inspiration to her.

I prepped a few cakes to work with her on. I made two tiny tiny cakes and pre-iced them so we could just cover them in fondant. Then I baked and leveled two other small two layer cakes to show her how to fill and crumb coat a cake.
We started by covering the two tiny cakes. I didn’t get photos of us covering them because I was obviously a little busy haha, but she did great.

Right away we started cutting out pieces of decoration for the cakes. She was a total natural.

She picked everything up so quickly and anything she didn’t get right away, she figured out within minutes!

We moved on to filling and crumb coating the larger cake, again, no photos of this, I was covered in frosting lol. Then we covered these in fondant. She found out that getting a nice, smooth, even coating of icing on a cake is hard work haha. I helped her a bit, remembering how hard it was for my the first time I crumb coated a cake.
She did a great job with the fondant though :)

Right away she was decorating every side of the cake and having a blast.

This was her finished large cake :)

Eros is obviously super creative and has some skillz! I think if she really wants to do this, she’ll do great! I’m so glad that I could be a part of helping her learn. She did such a great job and Kevin said she was super stoked on everything. I made them take home all of the cakes hahaha. My husband just lost 80lbs, so… we try to not keep a lot of cake around these days lol.

She wants to come over some time and help me out with a cake which would be great!

I think next week, I’m going to do a tutorial on how to ice a cake using just buttercream and make it look great! Stay tuned! Hope you enjoyed seeing Eros have her little cake making dreams come true! I had a blast working with her today!