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I recently was introduced to this great site Craftsy. It is seriously one of coolest sites I have ever seen for those of us who love to craft. It shares videos, tutorials, patterns, projects and supplies for just about every topic you can think of from paper crafts, photography, embroidery, quilting and my favorite CAKE DECORATING! I can't believe I am just now discovering this site! This would have been extremely helpful when I first became interested in cake decorating about 4 years ago.
One of the amazing features of this site is there are online videos with professional cake decorators who provide step-by-step instructions for all kinds of cake techniques from making buttercream, to crumb coating a cake to covering cakes in fondant and even specialty techniques like piping, sugar flowers and sculpted cakes. I could literally sit at my computer all day watching these very informative videos. I am a hands on visual learner so this site is perfect for helping me learn cake techniques at my own pace. One of the coolest parts about this site are that a lot of the videos are absolutely free! There are also online classes that you can pay for and then will have access to all sorts of new cake techniques and trends.
As you know from my blog I love to bake and decorate cupcakes and cookies and small sweets mainly. But secretly I would love to learn how to decorate all those gorgeous 3 tier cakes you see all over blogs that are absolutely stunning, show amazing detail and are covered in fondant. Fondant, is the one thing that is a little "scary" to me about cake decorating. I love working with fondant when it comes to adding extra small details to cakes and cupcakes, but covering an entire cake, let alone a tiered cake in fondant is something that although I have done a handful of times, I still have a lot to learn. I just can never seem to get my fondant rolled out to the correct diameter, and get it around the cake smoothly without a little bunching around the bottom. But through the Craftsy site, I watched Elisa Strauss, the owner of Confetti Cakes, video on Basic Fondant Techniques and she really helped clear up a few areas that I always seemed to have trouble with when covering a cake in fondant. I love the idea of being able to watch a video while at the same time performing the technique that is being explained. When I originally learned about decorating cakes with fondant I was in a class setting with an instructor and 10 other people and it was only a 2 hour class once a week for a month. So it was a very small amount of time with limited help to really grasp the concept and feel confident in my work. However, knowing that these videos are available online for me to watch at any time, and I can stop and pause them as I go is absolutely perfect.
Here are a few pictures of cakes from the Craftsy site using different fondant techniques.
I hope you will check out the details to this amazing and informative online class for Basic Fondant Techniques. I highly encourage you to enroll in this class as well as other classes provided. Elisa really does an amazing job of sharing tips for how to use fondant, color fondant, and to easily cover a round and square cake. After watching this video it really made me excited and not so intimidated to try to cover a cake in fondant again. These videos are a great learning tool because you can stop them while you work and they are available to access over and over.
So what are you waiting for, head on over Craftsy and be prepared to stay awhile because I was absolutely hooked on my first visit to the site and sat a few hours watching videos! I can't wait to continue to learn more cake decorating techniques through this amazing online community!
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