Last night I went to the first class for cake decorating!

For the first night, we met the two instructors - a mother-in-law, daughter-in-law team that own the store (see, you can have a good relationship with your in-laws!). They went through the syllabus and explained baking and icing techniques and the tools we'd need for class.

The three of us (myself and two friends) sat there and watched the whole thing with giant eyes. There are, apparently, many things I did not know about baking and icing.

Lessons learned last night:

• For a 9"x12" pan, you need one and a half cake mixes. Not one. This makes it thick enough to level and split, meaning you don't have to bake two and stack them.
• If your cake turns in to a mountain in the middle (mine always do), your oven is too hot. Unfortunately the small print on this tip is my oven also sucks.
  
• The icing that bakeries use is like the icing I make, only ... made with special stuff.
  
• Bakers have amazing toys. I mean, tools.
  

Next week we're to make a cake based on their instructions, and we're going to learn how to make different kinds of borders and accents. This means a trip to the store for special, top secret baker's ingredients, and probably a trip to Wal-Mart or Bed Bath and Beyond (with those handy 20% coupons) for my first batch of toys.