Second Class Cake - FAIL

So for our second class we were asked to bring in a one tier cake (flavor of our choice) and to use the rest of the batter for cupcakes (we're going to be decorating cupcakes for next week's class).

I brought in my plain yellow cake (hey, she said to use box cake mix and I certainly wasn't going to make it from scratch and then ruin it by covering it in their disgusting class buttercream recipe...so 99 cents box of Duncan Hines mix it was).

We learned how to "tort" our cake which is basically cutting through the middle (in half) and adding filling (see below)  Rocket science right? Not really but again remember, this is the BASIC class.

I filled my cake with vanilla custard. So it was time to decorate and we were given a choice of patterns/designs. Let me first say that there is no way, you can do all of this in the time allotted...or at least I should say, there is no way you can do it PROPERLY. First of all, you have to crumb coat your cake before decorating. Crumb coating is applying a THIN layer of buttercream over the entire cake to "seal" in the crumbs. This way, when you are spreading your frosting, you don't have crumbs attacking your spatula thus getting all over your pretty white frosting. You have to let the cake SIT for a while (at LEAST a good 15-30 mins) to allow your crumb coat to dry, but we didn't have this time.  By the time we got started, I had less than an hour to decorate my cake. That's not enough time.
Anyway, I did what I could.  I tried to crumb coat and let it sit for about 15 mins and guess what happened?  The teacher came around and said "I think you can decorate now, it looks pretty dry". Uhm, no lady, it is not dry I can tell.  She grabbed a paper towel to try and smooth the top of my cake and BAM ruined the top by smearing the icing all over the place.  GRRRREAT. THANKS LADY.  So I had to re-ice.  There goes 15 mins I just wasted. (Oh and I also made a pearl border that she smeared off with her stupid paper towel).

Anyway, long story short, here is my stupid cake.  I think it looks ridiculous.  I didn't have enough time to choose a "prettier" design from the options we had and honestly toward the end I just wanted to get the eff out of there.

Fabulous fish right? Yeah right. I'm telling you, it looked stupid.  What a lame ass fish. I didn't have enough time to coat it properly, the teacher smeared the top, it was a joke of a cake.  I wasn't proud of my cake at all and if it weren't for the fact that I knew sweet tooF would eat it, I would've thrown this crap in the trash.

This week we are going to decorate cupcakes.  They better turn out better than this stupid ass fish cake.