Hot Off Press Caking Class – A Review By Claire Hall

Claire Hall of @sprinklesinthewild recently booked classes at Fair Cake. Her review of Tara Gan’s Big Blooms class can be found here. Here is Claire’s review of our Hot Off The Press Caking Class, taught by the fabulous Laura Grix of Grix Cake Design.

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As a self taught baker I’m always looking out for exciting courses to improve my techniques and learn new skills. I’ve followed Fair Cake on Instagram for a while now and when the dates for the courses I was interested in coincided with dates I could get to London, I booked 2 courses!

My first 3 days were on ‘Hot Off The Press Caking’ with Laura Grix. I mainly make buttercream cakes, so I was looking forward to refining my skills and learning the right way of doing things, as opposed to me just giving something a go. We all got to ask Laura our questions and have enough time to see how everyone else was decorating their cakes.

We started off baking two different cakes, a 5″ vanilla and 7″ chocolate cake. Both recipes were very different to what I normally make and Laura was very good at explaining why she used these recipes and how you could go about altering them to suit your tastes.

That afternoon we made American buttercream and flavoured it with chocolate ganache to fill our chocolate cake.

Day 2 – We started off making Swiss Meringue Buttercream, the recipe was slightly different to the one I use and I was pleased with the result. We used a small amount of Swiss Meringue Buttercream and salted caramel to make our filling for our vanilla cakes, yummy!

We then levelled our cakes and crumb coated while learning how best to hold the scraper and what to look out for to ensure straight sharp edges. We started decorating by making two shades of pink water colour effect. It was quite a juggling show working with 2 cakes each and when each layer was complete that cake needed to be returned to the fridge to set before you could continue with the next task.

Day 3 – The most exciting day of all! We made the decorations!!! We used candymelts in different ways to make all our decorations. Candymelts thinned out with cream for the drip effect, candymelt sails with sprinkles, candymelts spread over bubble wrap (probably my favourite!) and lastly learning how to make those ‘so on trend’ feathers. Before putting it all together we discussed more vs less and balancing our decorations on our cakes.

I loved every minute of this course, Laura was a fabulous teacher and I can’t wait to use all these techniques on my own cakes in the future.

Follow Claire aka @sprinklesinthewild here