Icing and decorating cakes...too much fun!

Teaching cake decorating can be tedious since it really takes lots of practice from the students and this I can not do...however, there are so many ways to decorate a cake and so many different types of cake that with a program like ours we get to cover lots of colorful and tasty decorated cakes. Some of which are better served as desserts and others make wonderful special occasion cakes.
This cake for instance is the best in the height of strawberry season. We are so lucky to live in California that I can get strawberries all year round but this time of the year they are not optimum in taste or quality. BUT for teaching purposes we must use what we have so remember to buy in season and buy as local as you can....I am all for stretching those boundaries when needed, after all we should have variety in our diet and not all of us live in the produce wonderland that I do...but I try to avoid buying produce from other countries since we have no idea what chemicals are used in those countries on the food they produce. But that's just me...
Anyway, here I have a couple of examples of the fabulous cake styles that I teach.

First, is the strawberry cream cake made from a vanilla chiffon cake, soaked with a grand marnier cake syrup and filled with fresh strawberries and whipped cream and also iced in vanilla whipped cream. Since we did this right after Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday I decided to dedicate the cake to him...all in the name of demonstration :)

Again I used several ways to coat and ice the sides of a square cake so it looks a bit odd but you get the idea...I have one cake to demo several different techniques... I do what I can.
Next we have the Diplomat cake from Chef Bo Friberg's book The Professional Pastry Chef.
It is also a chiffon filled with pastry cream (custard), raspberry jam and iced with pastry cream and sliced almonds. Then lines are piped on the top of each marked out slice with an almond macaroon paste that is made of almond paste, sugar, and just enough egg whites to pipe it out in a strand. Then the entire cake is put into the oven and baked until the almond paste is toasted and so are the almonds on the sides.
Then you fill in the sections with sliced fruit and glaze the entire top of the cake...both beautiful and yummy too!!

Isn't it PURRRRDYYY????