And The Finished Product:
For my first attempt at cake decorating, I feel this cake turned out pretty well. I wish I had not added the extra chocolate chips around the rim and the top of the cake, but I felt I needed to hide some poor scraping skills.
But I had a lot of fun decorating this cake, and I can’t wait to get better at decorating. So start baking, and start piping.
Choose The Right Frosting
Taste of Home
Not all frostings are suitable for filling and topping cakes, but the good news is there are still a lot of delicious options. Buttercreams of all kinds work well for decorating. You can also use cream cheese frosting and ermine frosting. Essentially, you want a thicker frosting that can hold up under the weight of the layers of cake and will also stick to the sides.
In general, when it comes to decorating you want to avoid whipped cream frosting and very thin frostings.
Stacking And Filling Your Cake
Time to start stacking our cake! Start by placing your cake board onto the turntable and center it. Place a small dollop of buttercream on the board and put your first cake layer on the board. There should be a little space all the way around your cake between the cake and the board.
Place a big dollop of buttercream on top of the layer and use your offset spatula to push the buttercream to the edges of the cake. Then hold the spatula at a 45º angle, with the tip in the center of the buttercream and turn the cake slowly to flatten out the buttercream. Keep your spatula level so that the layer of buttercream is level.
I will periodically get down to eye level with the buttercream to check and see if its got a dome in the center or if it is nice and flat. A flat cake is a stable cake.
Optional: Fill Your Cake With Strawberry Puree and Strawberry Buttercream
If you want to spice up your filling, you can easily add some flavoring to your buttercream like a strawberry puree. You can fill your cake with straight strawberry but you need a very thin layer or your cake layers will slip around too easily. You can use my strawberry puree recipe but when you use fresh fruit, it always has to be refrigerated which can make the cake taste dry because the butter in the cake is cold.
I like to use this shelf stable strawberry filling that a lot of bakeries use. You can mix a little into your buttercream and make it flavored or you can spread a little straight onto your cake layers.
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Writing And Piped Designs
Taste of Home
Part of the appeal of bakery-bought cakes is the perfect penmanship that those cake decorators have. But its really not too hard to replicate at home. All youll need is a piping bag, a fine piping tip, a toothpick and some patience.
To start, write or print out the message or motif youd like to be featured on the top of your cake. If youre very new to piping, do a test run on a sheet of parchment or waxed paper to get used to how the frosting flows out of the piping bag.
After a little practice, trace the design onto a sheet of parchment or waxed paper and lay it on top of your cake. With a toothpick or sharp skewer, prick the design until you have a dot-to-dot of your message. Carefully remove the paper and connect the dots with your piped frosting. Thats all it takes to write on a cake! And once you have a few cakes under your belt, you can do this freehand.
Making Rosettes With Icing
For the rosette, use a star tip like 1M (or any medium-to-large star tipmany cupcake piping tips look beautiful with this technique, and each one will give a slightly different look.
Experiment to find your favoyrite!) In a very slow circular motion, spiral outwards and finish off in a circle.
Making Swirls with Icing
A swirl begins just like a rosette, however instead of finishing off, keep piping in an upward spiral, making the circle smaller as you go. Swirls look beautiful in any large star tip or even a French pastry tip.
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How To Make A Box Cake Taste Like Scratch
Ill let you in on a little secret, there are plenty of professional cake decorators out there who dont bake from scratch, they use a box mix and add ingredients to it to make it taste more like a scratch cake. This is called a doctored box mix and is quite tasty!
The most popular doctored cake mix is WASC which stands for White Almond Sour Cream Cake. But you dont have to use a white box mix, you can make the same adjustments to a yellow or funfetti box mix and it will taste just as good. If you want to use a chocolate box mix then check out the Chocolate WASC.
If you want to make your WASC into funfetti then add in 1/4 cup of jimmy sprinkles or confetti sprinkles. Mix into the batter at the very end of making the cake batter.
How To Cover Your Cake In Sprinkles
Sprinkles are bright, fun and, best of all, inexpensive and easy to use. Weve seen a growing trend in the baking world where bakers are covering whole cakes in sprinkles. Well show you how you can do it too!
Simply apply a crumb coat to your cake and chill until the icing is firm . A crumb coat is a thin layer of buttercream that holds in all the crumbs. That way, when you apply your second layer of buttercream, no crumbs can be seen on your beautifully frosted cake! Once your crumb coat is firm to the touch, apply the second layer of buttercream about 5 – 7mm thick and chill until the frosting is firm .
When your cake is chilled and firm to the touch, remove it from the fridge. Its time to get the fun part ready! Pour the sprinkles of your choice into a large sheet tray and roll your firm cake up and down the sheet tray to cover all sides in sprinkles. Once the sides are nicely coated, pop your cake on an upside down bowl in the sheet tray and sprinkle the top of your cake liberally with sprinkles and pat down gently, slowly embedding them into the buttercream. And there you have it – a fun looking sprinkle coated cake perfect for those fun birthday celebrations!
Now you know how to decorate your amazing bakes, why not check out our Bake Shop to find the right cake to try out your new-found skills?
We cant wait to hear how your decorations turn out – leave us a comment below with the details!
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Youve Decided To Bake And Decorate A Birthday Cake From Scratch Congrats Now What Im Going To Walk You Through The Entire Process Step
There are numerous considerations when creating a homemade cake. Lets walk through exactly how to make your homemade cake.
First, its important to consider what cake equipment is required. Likely you have many of these items in your home already cake pans, electric hand or stand mixer, measuring cups and spoons. Some you will need to purchase I recommend investing in quality tools. Ive experimented with less expensive tools and can say with certainty you do not get the same cake results.
Next, the perfect birthday cake recipe. Whenever I think about birthdays, the first flavour that pops to mind are the cakes where my mom used the best funfetti cake mix. Now, lets do a little upgrade and instead make a homemade version of the best funfetti cake recipe! I like to choose a recipe that has a little pizzazz, and sprinkle cake with sprinkle buttercream is sure to do the trick!
Moving right along, to top our moist funfetti cake, you need the perfect easy Swiss meringue buttercream. Dont worry if you havent heard of this buttercream frosting before, I have a full tutorial below! Its important to select a frosting that is silky, smooth, and easy to apply to your cake. Frosting a cake can be daunting if you havent been shown the tips and tricks. Carrying on
Follow along these posts in sequence from Step 1 to Step 4 to create a low stress, fun cake baking experience!
Fix The Edges And Smooth The Sides
The edge of the cake, where the top meets the side, will have some excess, uneven icing around it. But theres a way to fix this.
Using the edge of an offset spatula or metal bench scraper, lightly press down and push the icing towards the center, blending the excess with the rest of the icing.
To get a cleaner top layer on the top and sides, dip your offset spatula in hot water and wipe with a towel. Gently run the spatula around the sides and top. The heat from the metal will gently melt the top layer of the frosting, creating a smoother appearance.
Wipe away any excess icing that is on the board with a damp towel.
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To Get The Best Cake Decorating Kit For Beginners From Amazon Consider These Features:
Price
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Brand You should also consider the brand when buying cake decorating kit for beginners from Amazon. To make the best choice, its essential to understand each type of brand that various suppliers offer. High-end products from well-known companies like Apple typically cost more than lesser-known ones.
Function
Before making a purchase, consider the cake decorating kit for beginners feature. The specifications of a cake decorating kit for beginners frequently determine its functionality. As the specifications advance, the functionality advances as well.
Customer feedback
The customer reviews discuss the top cake decorating kit for beginners products that customers bought from Amazon. A review will always appear on the same page as the original product when it is posted.
If you use such reviews to judge the caliber of cake decorating kit for beginners, it will be simpler for you to decide whether to purchase the best option.
Wrapping And Chilling Your Cakes
Once your cakes are cool enough to handle, wrap them in two layers of plastic wrap and place into the freezer to chill for two hours or you can place them into the fridge to chill overnight. This is what I like to do so that I am not rushed to decorate. Do not freeze your cakes solid if you plan on using them the same day or it will just take a really long time to defrost them.
If you do freeze your cakes, place them on the counter still wrapped until they are defrosted.
Chilling your cakes is super important so that you can trim them and handle them without them breaking. The chilling causes the butter inside the cake to get nice and hard but will get soft again when the cake comes to room temperature.
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How To Slice A Cake
Taste of Home
After all the hard work of baking and frosting, you want every slice of your cake to be picture perfect.
To slice a cake cleanly, grab a sharp knife and dip it into hot water. Then wipe the knife dry and cut into the cake in one fluid motion. The heat from the knife will soften up the frosting and the sharp edge of the knife will give you the best looking slice. Wipe the knife clean and repeat for each slice.
Cake Decorating Idea: Add Piping
Using a pastry bag with a large star tip will help you re-create the look of this cake. Tint each row of frosting a darker shade to produce an ombré effect. To give your cake a sophisticated look, pipe your frosting through a fitted with a decorating tip. These cake decorating tools are generally inexpensive and easy to find. To get started, look for these shapes in a set of :
- Star tips are used to create stars, shells, flowers, decorative borders, and rosettes.
- Leaf tips are used to make leaf shapes.
- Round tips are used to make lines, dots, and writing.
- Basket-weave tips are used to make lattices and ribbon-like lines and borders.
- Flower tips are used to make cake flower decorations.
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Make Your Own Frosting
For the beginning baker, making frosting or icing from scratch can be a little intimidating. However, have you ever stopped to see whats actually involved in homemade frosting? All you need to whip up a simple buttercream is butter, powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla extract. Blend until youve reached the right consistency, and voila .youve got frosting from scratch.
The next time youre tempted to cheat and pick up a can or two of the store-bought stuff, look over the ingredient list. The sheer number of preservatives and additives might be the jolt you need to make the switch to the homemade frosting.
Our Favorite Frosting Recipes
- Caramel Buttercream
Peanut Butter Chocolate Poke Cake
When my family is planning a get-together, I can count on three or four people asking if Im bringing this chocolate peanut butter poke cake. If you dont have a chocolate cake mix, use a white or yellow one and stir in 3 tablespoons of baking cocoa. Fay Moreland, Wichita Falls, Texas
Learn how to decorate a cake like a pro!
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How To Create A Marble Effect Using Icing And A Toothpick
This classic design originally found on the light flaky French pastry, mille feuille, will give your cakes a pretty, dainty look to them. Sieve some icing sugar into a bowl and gradually add a few teaspoons of cold water to create a drippy consistency icing. Now do the same thing again, but add some colour or cocoa powder to help the icing contrast.
Add one of your icing mixtures to a piping bag . Fasten the loose end with an elastic band and place upright in a tall empty glass. Pour the other icing over your cake then chop the tip off your piping bag and make straight vertical lines up and down your cake/cupcakes and now using that ever-so-handy toothpick, lightly run it from left to right without lifting until you get to the end of your cake and there you have it, a beautiful and delicate mille feuille inspired look created in a few minutes tops.
Top tip: If you want to colour your icing, use a toothpick to add colour to your icing sugar mixture. This way you can never add too much at one time and it means less colourful washing up to do later! We like using coloured pastes instead of liquid colours to give a more vibrant shade. Also, remember with colour pastes, less is more!
How To Make Chocolate Ganache
For years I used buttercream in all my cakes but knowing how to make chocolate ganache was a game changer, especially if you are from somewhere warm. It is so amazing as a base underneath your fondant, and is alot more stable than buttercream as it can withstand heat little better. It also tastes amazing too! In this tutorial I go through how I make milk chocolate and white chocolate ganache.
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Easy Cake Decoration Ideas For Beginners
Maybe its your kids birthday or maybe your child was finally successful in achieving something they had been trying to achieve for months now and you wanted to celebrate or maybe you just felt like eating cake, because who needs an occasion to eat cake? And you want to try a hand at baking for a change instead of buying a store bought one but you have no clue how to decorate and what you need to decorate one!
Dont worry because you are at the right place! Weve listed down 12 super easy cake decorating ideas for beginners with a few tips to make your life easy! So keep scrolling to read more and get your kids and nieces and nephews who are beginners and try out these simple and classy cake decorating ideas with them today!
Q. How do you make simple cake decorations?
If you think cake decorating is difficult, heres the thing- it isnt tricky at all! With only two simple ingredients anyone can make a cake look pretty! Whether its melted cadburies and colourful confetti, fresh fruits, marshmallows, m& ms, Oreos and so much more! And it doesnt necessarily even have to look perfect! Messy cakes with rough textures topped with a flower or macaroons are the go-to these days! So fret and start baking today!
Q. What do you use to decorate a cake?
Turning table: A turning table makes icing a cake so much more convenient and saves an enormous amount of time! Without a turning table moving the cake board to decorate the entire cake hampers the flow of your hands.
Cake Decorating: Textured Technique
This rustic technique is extremely popular for weddings!
Immediately after base icing your cake, use a spoon or a small spatula to press an indentation into your cake while spinning the turntable. Stop when you reach the top to clean the spoon/spatula. On the top of the cake, repeat the same technique in a spiral.
You can touch up the edges by running your spoon one more time over the top side at the corner if needed. This technique is perfect for beginners because the rustic, imperfect look is just what makes it so striking! You could use flowers, greenery, or berries to top this cake, and it would be beautiful. I opted for some store-bought macarons and rosette swirls.
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