Cake Decorator Adds The Finishing Touch

By Nancy K. Crevier

“Patience, young grasshopper,” jokes Lori Erikson to an overeager student. It is the first night of Cake Decorating I at Michael’s Arts & Crafts Store in Brookfield and Ms Erikson is taking the class through the very basics. Elegant roses and classy cursive lettering will come later. For now, Ms Erikson explains, it is important to master the classic buttercream frosting that will be the basis of all designs simple and complex.

Lori Erikson, a Newtown resident, has been a certified Wilton cake decorating instructor for four years, teaching at Michael’s, and occasionally teaching private lessons in her home. Her cake decorating skills span more than 20 years, though.

When Ms Erikson’s father bought Les Alpes Bakery in Ridgefield right after she finished high school, what she thought was going to be just a summer job turned into a lifetime career when the outgoing baker saw talent in her first decorating attempts, and took her under his wing. “It was three weeks of intensive training,” recalled Ms Erikson, “and everything else I’ve just picked up.”

What she has picked up are all of the little tricks that make big differences in how a finished product turns out. Five days a week of decorating eight to nine cakes a day, plus special orders and holiday orders at Les Alpes, gave her plenty of opportunity to hone her skills. It was really on a whim, she said that she became a Wilton cake decorating instructor, when one day at the bakery as she was searching for a Wilton product she came across an ad for instructors needed. “I filled out the application and to my surprise got an immediate response. The area supervisor asked for photos of my work, loved them, and the rest is history, I guess,” Ms Erikson said.

Common sense has paid off in her practice of the art, as well. Wilton, a recognized leader in the manufacture and sales of cake decorating supplies, does have a guideline for teaching classes, but Ms Erikson also offers suggestions based on her own years of experience. And teaching classes has also meant learning to translate her own left-handed techniques into right-handed techniques for the many students she has taught over the years.

Her style of teaching is straight forward, peppered with humor, and extremely informative. First of all, for those in the class who have struggled at home to make a silky French buttercream turn out delicate blossoms and other decorative delights, we learn it just ain’t gonna happen for the novice cake decorator. The secret to fine decorating, it turns out, is a shortening-based frosting enhanced with meringue powder. Icing made with real butter does not have the holding power necessary for perfect decorations, and softens quickly when handled in a decorating bag. That is a problem for “newbs” like us.

She demonstrates the technique for the three basic icings that the class will use in each of the remaining classes and fields questions as she goes along. The tools of the trade that make decorating cakes fun are all explained, as well. The pros and cons of a turning plate, an offset spatula, small and large straight spatulas, a cake leveler, and flower scissors are all laid out.

“Why haven’t I ever bought one of those?” sighs one student as Ms Erikson twirls a cake on the turning plate with a flick of her finger, allowing the frosting to slide smoothly over the sides of the cake. She elicits “oohs” and “ahhs” from the students as frosting piped onto a flower nail is transformed into a delicate, red-tipped rose, a sample of what she promises we will all be doing by the time we leave the last class.

The first two-hour class is strictly demonstration — aside from an origami-like moment when we attempt to make parchment paper piping bags — and we are given our instructions for the next class: bring in a “buttercream” frosted cake, another recipe of the icing for decorating, and various other props that we will learn to use. Eight pairs of eyes gaze at Ms Erikson’s perfect, sample cake, and eight loud sighs fill the room.

Always Upbeat

But Ms Erikson will have none of that. Always positive, she admonishes the class that “Your cakes will be beautiful. Don’t even worry.” We leave the class, buoyed by her spirit.

We all arrive at the second class laden with numerous containers of frosting, which was our homework from last week, tools, tips, colorings, gels, piping bags, towels, aprons, enthusiasm, and our cakes. Our cakes, incidentally, each have their own story and their own peculiar beauty, just as she promised at the end of the first session…

This second class is all hands-on and before too long, one or the other of Ms Erikson’s students has found herself (all of the participants are women) in a sticky situation. The focus this night is on seemingly simple skills: dots, stars, squiggles, and writing. Like kindergarten students, we lean over our patterns and try mightily to get our dots to look like dots — “Don’t pull up the piping bag before you quit squeezing,” Ms Erikson cautions us. “Otherwise you’re going to have little Hershey Kisses, not dots.” She is right, but the urge to keep squeezing and lifting gets the better of most of us, most of the time. But Ms Erikson continues to be encouraging, pointing out the number of good dots we make and overlooking the ovals, Kisses, and otherwise undotlike globs of frosting with which we have covered our papers.

Before frustration and gales of laughter take over, she moves us on to making hearts. Two quick swipes and she has demonstrated a perfect little heart. Her patience is immense as we struggle to emulate her sample. Curving lines and squiggles are our introduction to the importance of pressure when decorating with frosting. Uneven squeezing of the piping bag can quickly turn a graceful curve into a broken up line that fades from fat to thin. When she senses we have mastered that about as much as a two-hour class would allow, she moves us on to bigger and better things, like writing on the cake.

Once again, we settle in to practice printing and cursive writing so that one day we can convey our “Best Wishes” or “Congratulations” to some lucky cake eater. Ms Erikson shares practical tips for writing, sympathizing that tracing someone else’s handwriting is actually harder than doing it without a guide. “Go ahead and try it without the guide,” she urges. “Everyone finds that they have their own favorite style, printing or handwriting, so don’t be discouraged,” she says. And while it is tempting to painstakingly form each letter, it turns out that a better effect is often achieved by writing quickly.

Making rose is a multiclass lesson. Tonight we learn to form the center of the rose. Again, looks simple, but what leaning towers and funny buttons we turn out before the evening ends. Our homework for next week? Learn to spin the flower nail, a special tool for making those elusive roses.

The evening ends with each of us putting to use the new skills we have attempted to master and decorating our cake. And once more, as we leave, Ms Erikson assures us that our cakes are more beautiful than we think.

Everyone who has ever eaten a decorated cake has seen the rows of shells that border the confection. They look so easy, and yet… several minutes into the third class where we are practicing shells, mine are woefully wanting. More “humps” than “shells,” they are another example of why Ms Erikson emphasizes the importance of learning to apply even pressure to the piping bag, and learning when to ease up on that pressure. From shells we work on step two of the rose, the center of the flower. It is a simple movement when demonstrated by Ms Erikson, and under her guidance each of us becomes more and more proficient, gaining confidence that we truly will be turning out beautiful blossoms one day.

Practice

“Practice is what it takes,” Ms Erikson reminds everyone. From roses we move on to figure-making and our cupcakes are soon adorned with cheery 3-D clown figures, the result of artfully applied icing. Next comes an exercise in turned flowers that requires some concentration to combine the right amount of wrist twist at the right moment. As with each proceeding class, Ms Erikson is constantly on the move, making a suggestion here, adjusting a piping bag there, and offering her two decades of experience to make our attempts more successful.

Even though Les Alpes closed in 1993, Ms Erikson has continued to perfect her skills by making and decorating cakes for weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, and other special occasions. The mother of four, she has ample opportunity to decorate birthday cakes, and her three girls, especially, delight in selecting their birthday cakes each year from the Wilton cake book she has at home. Only once has she dissuaded a child from her selection. “One daughter, whose birthday is near Halloween, chose a haunted house one year. Now this cake was mostly black icing, which really tastes bad. So I convinced her that it would be too big for the family to eat and too much cake would go to waste,” said Ms Erikson.

Other than restricting the “yuck” factor, Ms Erikson enjoys a challenge when decorating. “I love making flowers and I like having to research something I haven’t done before. I enjoy doing this, and I try to remember, and pass on to my students, that it is only a cake. People will enjoy it and then it’s gone. It’s just a lot of fun,” she said.

The fourth and final evening finds our class spinning out roses under Ms Erikson’s watchful eye. The preceding lessons have paid off and our rose centers are blossoming with carefully applied petals tonight. This is where we learn the importance of having our frosting the right texture. Too stiff, and our rose petals crack and peel as we pipe out the thin strips of frosting. Too soft, and the petals droop. We are putting together a lot of the skills Ms Erikson has passed on to us in the month of lessons: the importance of applying the right pressure to the piping bag, holding the bags at the correct angle, keeping our hands steady, and choosing the right tip for the right job.

Sweet peas bloom from the tips of our bags, leaves form magically, and this week our shells are resembling their namesake much more so than last week. All the while, Ms Erikson patiently moves from student to student, tipping the bag a little bit up, adjusting the elbows, straightening a tip, and always passing out plenty of praise.

This past July, Wilton honored Ms Erikson with a pin commemorating her 500th student. “I was so surprised. I enjoy the people I meet so much,” she said. “What I like best is the reaction I get when the person I’ve decorated the cake for likes the result, or when a student masters a technique. Then all of the work is worthwhile.”

The last class culminates with the application of several of our newly learned talents to decorate a cake. “You are doing wonderfully,” Ms Erikson encourages us. “Look at this beautiful rose,” she exclaims, as she watches one student carefully attach it to her cake top. Dozens of tiny turned petal flowers form bouquets, and ruffled leaves and standing leaves are artfully applied to give the illusion of a garden atop the neatly frosted cakes. Star borders and shell borders trim the edges of the cakes and when we all step back, we have to pat ourselves on the back — and give our thanks to our instructor, whose faith in our abilities never wavered.

Ms Erikson teaches the three different Wilton cake decorating classes, each designed to be taken independently of the other after Course I is completed, as well as Wilton’s first new class in 20 years that focuses on gum paste decorating. Information about the year-around classes can be found at michaels.com.