About a year and a half ago, I took the beginning Wilton Cake Class at JoAnn's with my friend Erin. We had a really fun time and learned some good tips & tricks. I've done a few cakes since then, but I was ready to learn some new things. So when Chrissy was signing up for the second class, I signed up with her and for the last four Monday nights I've been playing with sugar, lots of sugar! This class was mostly about making different types of flowers, which sort of freaked me out since I wasn't very good at making buttercream flowers in the first class.
In this class, we used royal icing & turns out I can actually make some flowers now! We made violets, apple blossoms, primroses, pansies, daffodils, daisies, and roses. Here's a picture of all the flowers I've made in the last few weeks.
...and here's the final project. I also made a little picket fence out of color flow icing but decided to leave it off the cake. Note to self, unless you're going for a very specific look, do not use brown icing. :-)
Last week was my long anticipated trip to Seattle to visit Emily & John! This was my first trip to Seattle, so I tried to cram in as much sight-seeing as possible while I was there. I got to visit many interesting places and do a lot of exploring in the downtown area. My first stop was Pioneer Square for the Underground Tour, where I learned about the Seattle Fire and subsequent rebuilding & regrading of the city. This picture is shows store front windows that have been bricked over. Originally, these would have been on the ground level, but when the city was regraded they were below street level. The "ceiling" in this picture is really the underside of the present-day sidewalk.
We spent last week cruising the western Caribbean with the Duffy's & Hoch's. We visited Belize City where we walked through a rain forest and went cave tubing. Floating down the river made it hard to carry a camera, so no pictures there. We were scheduled to visit at Costa Maya but weren't able to get off the boat due to the high winds and rough waters. It looked pretty as we floated by though!
Our last stop was Cozumel. From Cozumel, we took a ferry to Cancun and then a bus ride to visit the Mayan ruins of Tulum. This was also our chance to visit the beach and jump in the waves. Despite a really rough ferry ride back to the boat, the weather was beautiful that day and we took a lot of really great pictures.
We had a lot of fun on the ship playing putt putt, climbing the rock wall (Bryan made it to the top), and soaking up the sun! To see the rest of our pictures, go to http://picasaweb.google.com/schoeff and click on Cruise '09.
