Cake Decorating Basics

If you are regular reader than you know I’m all about cakes. Making them, eating them and sometimes smashing them. If you aren’t a reader, than let’s catch-up later. For now we are going to talk about my obsession with becoming a better cake maker. Sure I have the baking part down, the buttercream down—what I don’t have down: finishes, as in beautifully decorated cakes.

I decided it was time to get busy and learn it. With that I signed up for Craftsy, an online community with top-notch instructors teaching you how to be—well, crafty—be it sewing, knitting, crafting, baking or in my case a better cake crafter. Along with that they also have classes from some favorites like Peter Reinhart, Alice Medrich and Maggie Austen.

To keep your interest and for the sake of brevity, I’m going to hit this with some bullet points. And I’m doing so, because I hope you head over and check out for yourself why this online community is one of the best ways to learn anything from basics like making and covering a cake with buttercream, fondant works, to advanced classes like wedding cakes and sculpted and novelty cake classes.

Here’s how it works:

1. Sign – up and create an account. They have free courses as well as paid courses. The nice thing about having an account—you can keep track of your classes, but better yet, you can take notes during the online class an they’ll be saved.
2. Watch the video at your leisure and comfort. Stop and start as you need, take notes, ask questions, save your favorite portions.
3. You become part of community that helps one another through an open forum with Q&A to include the instructor.

So how is this better than an in-person class?

1. It’s way cheaper, about half the price.
2. Stuck on a certain step—no worries—you have the ability to watch what you over and over again.
3. At Craftsy’s there’s a community of people with all varying skill levels to answer questions and share tips for success.
4. My favorite part is being able to watch when needed. Yes, I’m a hands-on person, but in-person classes don’t allow for rewind and repeat as necessary. With these on-line classes you move at your pace.

As you can see I think Craftsy is rock’n. Want to see how the value of this free class? Tune in next week when I put the lesson to application in a holiday themed cake.

And since we are a week away from the my reveal, you have time to go, sign-up and we can cake-along together, or you can at least go get a taste of what Craftsy has to offer by taking one of their FREE mini-classes. Along with that, Craftsy is offering Bakers Royale readers 25% off a full length Craftsy course. That goes for classes ranging from cake design, photography, food and cooking, sewing and knitting, paper crafting, jewelry making, gardening, and home décor. There’s a lot of offerings so hit the jump here and take a look.

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Craftsy. The opinions and text are all mine.