Lynelle's Butter Cream Icing

When Bill and I first got married and moved to Huntsville, AL, he went off to school/Army Basic Officers course every day and I sat at our little aartment and didn't have a lot going on, so... I singed up for a couple of classes.

One was a quilting class.  It was hand piecing quilting.  Ever since then, even though I know many people machine piece, in my head and heart somewhere I have to only do handpiecing, as it's nearly a lost art.  Now to say that, I have NEVER finished even ONE thing I started in that very first class back over 25 years ago now!!!  It's beautiful, but wow!  I need to just give in and so machine quilting if ever I might want a chance at finishing A project!

The other class I signed up for was a cake decorating class at Lynelle's Cakes and Decorating Supplies 3055 Leeman Ferry Rd SW Huntsville, AL 35801, United States‎
 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lynelles-cake-decorating/277271099036328

If I remember correctly the class was about 8 weeks long and I had to bake a cake and bring it ready to decorate each week.  That is a LOT of cake for newlyweds... So I would have some of Bill's classmates over for dinner and desert.  most of the weeks had a theme and she showed us what to do as we learned skills.  I remember a couple of the cakes I learned to decorate.  Chantilly Lace - That one was one of my favorites.  We learned how to make flowers, and different things.  The last class was more just for fun, and we got to bring our already decorated cake (anything we wanted) to class to show.  We had friends of ours from Bill's West Point days that were down in S. AL going to flight training school, coming for the weekend.  I had a little fun with it, and iced the cake in light blue then decorated it with a helicopter and big white fluffy clouds.  I remember thinking it was cute.  I took pic's of all of my cakes, but alas, I don't know where to find them, and the one's at the end I THOUGHT I had taken pic's.  We also went to lookout mountain that weekend with our friends, and to some caverns, and all those pic's were NO point, because it turned out there was actually NO FILM in my camera!!!!!  Back in the olden days when you actually had to buy film and you didn't tend to just snap away at everything, since you didn't really know how good the pic was going to turn out (if it was blurry, etc.) until after you got it developed at the store once the whole roll of 26 pic's was all taken.  Anyway, I have thought over the years about how I was sad to have 'lost' those cake pic's (and the one's of our friends over the weekend).

Since that time I have made cakes mostly just out of LOVE for my own children.  I have been asked if I'd make them for other people, but the reality is that I have only ever made them for my own family, and for a couple of baby showers along the way that I was co-hosting. I will say that the first ever birthday cake I made for Rebekah was one that I had a recipe from a magazine for, and I don't know if I used Lynelle's butter cream icing or not.

Over the years, Rebekah has decided her favorite birthday treat/cake is actually a Chocolate Raspberry Torte. So not so much cake decorating went into that one.  And one year Hannah just wanted her cake to be the one from Chuck E. Cheese where we were having her party (at first I will admit I was almost a little hurt, but it turned out to be a blessing, since Bill ended up having to have surgery that morning to have a large kidney stone removed and then I went straight upstairs to a labor/birth that took 16 hours, so I would have had not time to finish a cake.  A good friend of ours from Bill's work came and picked Bill up from the hospital and took him in his drugged state to sit at the birthday party, and Rebekah was able to drive the rest of the kids to the birthday party!).  The only other cake I specifically remember being a store bought cake was for Liam's 2nd Birthday.  Again I was at a birth, and so a friend watched him during the day.  The sisters all wanted to celebrate his birthday ON his Birth DAY, so Bill stopped and got a store bought cake from the store on his way home after he picked him up after work.

In recent years with the popularity of fondant I have done more and more cakes with fondant (once I finally gave in and stopped resisting that and learned how to use it). Some people don't like fondant all that much, Marissa LOVES it! she specifically requests it on her cakes now.

One year for Liam's birthday, I had begun the process of making the various fondant decorations for Liam's birthday cake several days (a week or so) in advance. I had baked the cake the day of all the crazy Tornado's (on April 27th 2011) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_25%E2%80%9328,_2011_tornado_outbreak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNTCFN7yfgQ
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndh-sBuEnKw    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyd_B2mEcFY   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xSp33GTxs4   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwfD1hRZ1Qw   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM7FD_9XEj8  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFFBQykxsc   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unz6Cz2sFPI