A couple months ago I decided to sign myself up for a cake decorating class.  It wasn’t a fancy one where you learn to pipe icing and make rosettes, just a fun way to make your cakes look extra nice without stressing out about it.  Or so I thought.

Yesterday was the big day.  I’d had two months to get myself psyched up for the class.  I thought that if I enjoyed it enough, I might sign up for others.  This one was relatively inexpensive – under $100 if you don’t include the cost of parking in Boston – so it was my “test” class.

I will not be signing up for more classes there.

To begin, I misunderstood the course description.  I maintain that it was poorly worded, but that is neither here nor their.  I’d driven an hour to get there, parked ($18) and paid for the course in advance.  I figured I might as well make the most of it.  Heck, it could be fun!

Essentially I paid about $100 to take home a few mediocre cake recipes peppered with typos.

There were about a dozen people in the class, and we were divided into teams.  I was paired up with a woman who knew what she was doing.  (Thank goodness!  Most of the others there admittedly couldn’t boil water.)  Our team was assigned the flourless chocolate cake with ganache.  Sounds yummy, right?  I wouldn’t know.

Another team was working on a bundt cake.  One girl from the team decided to check how her cake was doing.  She pulled the rack out of the oven far enough that the two cakes started to slide forward.  (Guess who the second cake belonged to!)  She managed to save her team’s bundt from falling onto the floor.  I watched helplessly as our cake slid out, flipped, and fell upside-down onto the dirty floor.

The instructor said to go ahead and make the ganache anyway.  She had some chocolate wafer cookies and we could make sandwiches out of them.  Wow, thanks.  That’s really getting our money’s worth.  For those who don’t know what a ganache was, it’s just melted chocolate blended with cream and sometimes butter.  Nothing to complex.  Nothing I’d drive into town and take a class for.

There were also some strawberries available, so we dipped those in lieu of making sandwiches.  We didn’t learn much (except maybe to not waste our money on any more classes), but the strawberries were delicious!

By the way, I purposely avoided mentioning the school by name.  If you were planning on taking a cooking class in the Boston area and want to know who it was (presumably so you don’t waste your money), you can leave a comment on this post or use the Contact Me link on the right.  I’ll send you the name by email.