In the past five years there has been an online education explosion. Location is no longer a barrier to study and accessibility to the internet is becoming easier with the decreasing prices of mobile phones and data plans.

One of the most exciting recent additions to the online food education world is ‘Lean Cake Decorating Online’; a website that is bringing world-class cake decorators and pastry chefs into your workplace to deliver one-on-one training.

This amazing opportunity enables teachers to have a global reach like never before and to share trends with students on the other side of the world. For budding bakers and pastry chefs in Australia, this means access to the best of the world’s trends before they even hit our shores.

Creator of Learn Cake Decorating Online Louise Vansleve says with an 80 per cent international membership base, she is seeing her teachers connect with students from Canada, Puerto Rico, Egypt and Greece.

“This truly is so exciting. I started this site because when I started decorating, it was challenging to travel to classes whilst my daughter was very young as well as the expense involved in taking face-to-face classes,” Louise says.

“I wanted to create something for people who were also faced with the same hurdles to follow their dreams. Now I realise that accessing high quality tuition is a predicament facing people globally and being able to bring a resource like this to people all over the globe is an amazing feeling.”

Louise says the unexpected benefit of this website is the amazing connections the teachers and students are making.

“We have everyone from high-end professionals in the site, bakery owners from Asia who would like to branch out into wedding or birthday cakes, right down to mums at home on maternity leave who want to learn to make their children’s cakes. It truly is a fascinating and wonderful collective of people,” she says.

Learn Cake Decorating Online has assembled a wonderfully diverse team of decorators from Margie Carter – the fantastically artistic original co-founder of Sydney’s now famous Planet Cake – and Handi Mulyana, who has been decorating since a child in his family’s bakery in Indonesia and now travels the world extensively teaching cake decorating. The vibrant Verusca Walker, who is nothing short of an internet sensation with a facebook group of more than 40 000 members, is also on the books and then there is little old me; pastry chef and chocolatier Jessica Pedemont! I am thrilled to bring my fun chocolate and baking artistry to the forum.

For me, one of the best things about the website is its ability to foster an interactive community. Under the video tutorials you can see students asking each other questions, and receiving feedback from their online teachers. Many students also post their cakes on the Facebook page.

Learn Cake Decorating Online add to their site a minimum of two new tutorials a month and with each tutorial coming with a downloadable ebook and recipe books, a membership fee of $9.95 seems almost not enough.

Upcoming classes include some very intricate figurine modelling, mad hatter shapes as well as a range of glorious sugar flowers to adorn the most elegant wedding cakes. And it is not just the outside of the cake that will be covered. With baking tutorials, chocolate making and classes on edible gifts still to come, this is one site you can’t afford not to be a part of.

Interested? Make sure you check it out, even if it’s just for some of their regular free tutorials.

Website: www.learncakedecoratingonline.com

Facebook Page:

www.facebook.com/learncakedecoratingonline

Youtube: Learn Cake Decorating Online

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