Heres the update for week 3!!

Here is a little bit of what has been going on this week. Last Sunday, I went to the Viking Store in Atlanta and I took my first "real" cooking class. Wow, it was such a great experience. The instructor that taught the class had done her externship under the guy who did Princess Diana's wedding cake (I thought that was a pretty cool piece of trvia!). She gave us all sorts of neat hints and tricks to decorate beautiful cakes. The staff in the store also takes great care of you, we had breakfast and lunch provided. If you ever get a chance to take one of their classes, I would highly recommend it. Another great thing is that when you take a class they give you a discount toward merchandise or future classes, so, I went ahead and scheduled the advanced class in March.
I made the sunflower cupcakes for garden club on Tuesday night. I got the idea out of a book called Hello, Cupcake! It is filled with great ideas that you dont need any fancy equipment for. When I took the class at Viking, they gave each student a packet with some great recipes in it. So the icing that I used to decorate the cupcakes was their Italian Buttercream. Italian Buttercream is light and not too sweet. It was also great consistency for decorating. Making this icing is not easy, especially when you misread the recipe (like I did). I misread the temperature that I was supposed to cook the sugar to, and I almost ruined a saucepan. Another issue that I had was that I don't own a candy thermometer, so I used a cheapo meat thermometer. Not a good plan... However, I finally got it all to work together.