1. Jane Cox
Ms. Tillery
Senior Project
April 18th, 2012
Cake Decorating
Think back to all of your past birthdays, your wedding, and many other occasions.
What do they all have in common? Cake! Hi. My name is Jane Cox and I am going to be
talking to you about my experience of learning how to decorate cakes.
For my senior project, I created this two tiered cake. Growing up, I've watched
my mom make several cakes that have pleased people. I wanted to be like her and create
an art that not only that you can appreciate, but an art that can satisfy the senses. With the
aid of my research paper about the background of Wilton, a major producer of cake
decorating supplies, I was also able to find the classes I needed to take to succeed in my
project. I took a total of three courses, each involving four classes. The first one consisted
of using the techniques in decorating using the original butter cream icing, while the
second used the techniques in royal icing, and the third in fondant. I also was able to
finish my cake with the help of my project facilitator, Michelle Williams. She bakes
cakes on the side as a hobby and is even thinking about opening up her own store. She
helped me with the construction of my cake and gave me pointers on how to improve. I
started out baking my cakes, where I ended up using pound cakes because they hold up
better in layered cakes. After I got the cakes baked and put together, I ended up
transporting the cake as a whole to my house from my project facilitator's house to
actually start the decorating of the cake. I first tried rolling out the fondant into one big

2. sheet to cover all of my layers, but we couldn't get it big enough and found it hard to
mold to the cake in general. We finally learned to ice the cakes with butter cream icing
before putting on the fondant and to do it layer my layer instead of the whole cake, put
together. As you see, this is a two layered cake. Originally this was made out to be a three
tiered cake. We still had some difficulty in getting the fondant to mold to the bottom
layer and still ended up failing after several tries. We ended up running out of fondant
and decided to just do away with the bottom layer. We put the top two layers together and
then I started rolling out my ribbon. I took yellow fondant and kneaded a little but of red
dye into it to give the ribbon a blended, peachy color to match the roses. I then formed
them to the cake and draped them down the side of the cake. Several days prior to all of
this is when I made my roses, to give them time to harden to their shape, but even then I
had a hard time in getting the petals to stay in place. I originally made the roses out of
yellow fondant and painted the tips of them with a mixture of red dye and gum paste and
stuck them to the ends of my ribbon. Lastly, I rolled out a strand of fondant to go around
the edge of my cake and indented pearls into it as my border and then just pushed the
pearls around the second layer of my cake as a less eye catching border.
During this whole process, I've definitely learned that cake decorating is not as
easy as you think it would be. You have to have a lot of patience, to be calm, and to work
very diligently. Things got hard for me when I was loosing patience and started to get
frustrated. I also learned that even if you make mistakes, there's always ways around it to
fix them and in the end, things will turn out to be just right. What I'd like to leave you
with is this: the next time you see a cake, think about all the time, effort, and talent it

3. takes to go into that cake. Thank you for your time for seeing my presentation and to see
judge my final product. I will now take any questions that you may have.