Lessons from cake decorating

Things have been pretty dull this month, mainly due to sickness, but Wood Sprite was able to take a fun cake decorating class with our friend M in our local homeschool group. You can see in the photo that she added a filling, iced and decorated the cake, and dug right in as soon as we got home! M really went all out and did an amazing job with the kids and cakes.

While Wood Sprite was icing, we learned so many new things. I had no idea that you use a paper towel to get that smooth, clean look—or that freezing cakes makes them so durable and moist! But we also learned a bunch of other things during, or as a result of, the class.

Lazy Susans come in handy. We use ours for spice containers at home and never would have dreamed of using it for a cake! You can put a cake on it and spin it to ice it, and now I’m thinking of using it during our activities—like putting paint on it—so the kids can access all of the materials much more easily.

Peer influence can be a good thing. Wood Sprite hates lettuce, kale, spinach and any other leafy green that I try to get her to eat. But when her friend E picked her some kale from his garden, she promptly fell in love with it and now she’s eating it at home! Maybe it wasn’t as “cool” when mom ate it…

We really can do anything. I’m always going on about how we wait for experts to teach us how to do this or that—but there I was, reluctant to really help much because I’m not a cake expert! M assured us that it’s a fun process and it’s easy to learn, but also that it is a skill that comes in handy in other ways, such as spackling. She really reminded me that we can DIY our way through anything. I think getting our old house and being faced with all of the repairs and updates really has me overwhelmed, but when I think of it her way—the way I used to think!—it seems so much more manageable. So thanks for the class and much more, M!

Photo courtesy of Wood Sprite