Get Support When You Need It
In the cakey world, we are blessed to have such a wonderful, supportive community. If you don’t already follow us on get involved, and don’t forget if you’re a Premium or a Pro member you have your very own special groups. Our Q& A forum is also a brilliant place to see advice from fellow cakeys. So if you’ve got a question, big or small, help is out there!
Cake Decorating Tip #: Use A Cake Acrylic Disk When Applying Your Buttercream
Using an acrylic disc on top of your cake will help create those clean-cut edges youre looking for on your cake. This just helps with making sure the top and sides of your cake are nice and distinct from one another. It can be a little tricky to remove the acrylic disc once youre done applying your buttercream though. Watch this video HERE that shows you the best way to do it.
How To Bake A Cake
Preheat your oven to 350ºF and place the oven rack in the center of the oven. If its too low the bottom of your cake will burn. If its too high the top will get too crispy. Let your oven preheat for at least 30 minutes to give the oven time to get hot enough.
Grease your pans. I prefer to use a homemade cake release called cake goop which is super simple to make. You can also use PAM or you can coat the inside of your pan with a thin layer of vegetable shortening, dust it with some all-purpose flour and tap out the excess flour. Make sure you go all the way up the sides.
Place all your ingredients into the bowl of a stand mixer and mix on medium for 2 minutes. Divide your batter evenly between your cake pans.
Bake your cakes in the oven 30-40 minutes until a toothpick comes out of the center of the cake cleanly. Its ok to bake your cakes for longer if they are not done. Place the cake pans onto a cooling rack or on top of your oven to cool down.
Once the cake pans are cool enough to handle , you can turn them upside down onto the cooling rack and the cake should fall right out. Let them cool for another 10-15 minutes until barely warm.
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Best Cake Decorating Tools For Frosting
Whether you’re throwing on a quick crumb coat or trying to create the ultimate smooth edge, any cake decorator needs a few trusty cake supplies for frosting.
- Offset spatula: Use for spreading frosting across the top of the cake or along the sides. This tool can also be great for creating pretty frosting swirls on the top and sides.
- Bench scraper: Use a bench scraper to smooth out the frosting on the cake or blend piped stripes of frosting together.
- Cake turntable: To make frosting much easier, place your cake on a cake decorating turntable or rotating cake stand before frosting. This will make adding and smoothing frosting SO much faster!
How To Start A Cake Decorating Business From Home
So you have perfected the art of baking and are wondering if you are ready to turn your hobby into a cake decorating business from the comfort of your home. The first step is determining if this is something you are practically up for you dont want to bite off more than you can chew, so to speak.
This article aims to give you highly unique, informative, and actionable information about the benefits of turning cake decorating into a business, how to turn your kitchen space into a baking station, and how to start the business.
How do you know if youre up for the cake decorating business? Here are some things to consider:
- Do you have great baking skills?
- Do you know anything about running a business?
- Do you have the right baking equipment?
- Do you have the gumption it takes to be an entrepreneur?
Whether or not you answered yes to all these questions, there are ways to prepare for success. To pursue your dream of owning a cake business, youll need an outline of what you can expect, the steps you should take, and how to follow through on the process.
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Chocolate Fingers And Cigarellos
This is a great technique for covering up any flaws on your cake. If it’s a little burnt around the edges and you’ve had to cut some bits off – or if it didn’t rise as much as you’d like, get the chocolate fingers and cigarellos at the ready. Just cover your cake in buttercream, chocolate or royal icing and press them around the edges of the cake. They give you a great base for topping your cake with sweets, fruits or flowers too.
Top tip: The more chocolate fingers or cigarellos you’ve got, the better. There’s nothing worse than getting halfway around the cake and realising you haven’t got enough to finish off your masterpiece.
Recipes to try chocolate fingers and cigarellos:
Get the recipe: Digger cake
Get the recipe: Chocolate fingers cake
Get the recipe: Cigarellos cake with a chocolate mousse filling
Which Techniques Will I Learn In An Online Cake Decorating Class
Depending on your skill level, cake decorating classes teach myriad techniques. Beginning decorators may learn how to stack cakes, use buttercream and ganache, or create painted or airbrushed cakes, along with cake toppers. More advanced classes teach decorating for themed cakes such as unicorn, wedding, sculpted cakes, and even how to decorate a box explosion cake.
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Decide Which Products/services To Offer
As a new cake decorating business, you probably want to offer a little of everything. But while that sounds like a good idea, its in your best interest to focus on specific areas.
If you have to buy supplies and ingredients to keep on hand so you can make one kind cake that might get ordered, thats costing your business time and money.
Having a little of everything.
Having a wide range of offerings can make you an appealing option for a broad range of people wanting different things, but specializing in specific areas makes you an authority and lets you charge more for your services.
A quality product builds a better reputation and income over time than saying yes to every request that comes in. Dont hesitate to refer specialty requests you cant handle to someone who does. That referral can often come back to you.
Figure out your niche and stick to it.
Is your niche fondant cakes?
Or maybe you prefer working with Buttercream?
You can even have a specialty gluten-free cake shop, which would attract quite a bit of business your way.
What can you offer that nobody else can?
Maybe its your cake decorating style, or your service, or maybe its your experience. Figure it out, write it down, and make it a point to have one of your cake creations that showcases your unique style and skill on display at your store for customers to see.
Here are some common offerings for a cake decorating business:
Filled Round Layer Cakes:
Filled Sheet Cakes:
Sheet Cakes with No Filling:
Learn More About Hands
1 week agoClass Information: A fondant cake requires a great deal of discipline and patience to ensure a straight, smooth vertical side and a perfectly flat surface. We will cover all aspects of creating a fondant cake, from baking to kneading the various colours into the fondant. You will decorate a
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Advice Needed To Start Baking Classes
I have been getting request from a lot of people to teach baking, an am now thinking on these terms seriously, hence I would like some advice on how to go about this. I also have a few questions that probably the experts here would be able to answer:
While teaching baking, how many types of cake can u teach in each class
Is decorating the cake taken along with a same class or seperate
also what can be done with the baked cake..is it given to the students or what .as I would not like to keep the cake at home after the class.
how much time & how many hours will be the lenght of each class
Is the material used for the baking is at the teachers expense or will the cost be taken from the students.
Can the cake experts here please advice. Thanks n have a nice day everyone
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Get Into The Cake Decorating Business Community
Networking is so important to building a successful business. Thats why getting involved in the cake decorating business community is so critical.
The International Cake Exploration Society, for example, is a great online community which would let you network with others and learn new tips and techniques to improve your business.
On top of that, you can find events and tradeshows around the country to visit. Facebook has a thriving cake decorating culture, so look for groups on there as well as Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and even meetup.com for groups you can connect with.
You never know where your big break or referral may come from, so make sure to attend events either in person or virtually to benefit your business.
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Apply The First Cake Layer
Place a prepared cake round on top of the cake board. Make sure it is centered on the board.
Heres a tip: spread a small amount of frosting on the middle of the board, then place the bottom cake layer on top.
The frosting acts as cement to keep it from sliding around the board as you are decorating. Its much easier to decorate if your cake is anchored in place!
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.
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Optional: Trim The Brown Edges Off Your Cake
This is definitely a bonus option but I always trim off the brown from my cakes because I think it makes a prettier slice. Its honestly pretty easy to do and also makes the cake very slightly smaller so you have less of a chance of having brown show through your buttercream.
Turn your cake upside down so the bottom is at the top. Slide your knife just under the brown skin and slowly cut it off in one piece. Keep your knife nice and flat for best results. Do the same thing to the sides.
You can see the difference.
If the brown doesnt bother you then you can definitely skip this step.
Best For Beginners: Sugar Geek Show
Sugar Geek Show
Why We Chose It: Sugar Geek Show beginning tutorials not only cover the basics but also extensively address common troubleshooting issues, so you can start with a great foundation before you move to the more advanced stuff.
ProsSpecific tutorials and videos for common issuesLots of free tutorials and blog postsSeven-day trial membershipConsOnly one instructor
Sugar Geek Show is the blog and online school of Liz Marek, a Cake Master-nominated website with over 200 cake-making and decorating tutorials. A former graphic designer, Marek accidentally started her cake career by making cakes for her friends and family, and through word of mouth, her efforts turned into a business. After writing a successful cake decorating book, she and her husband started up Sugar Geek Show and closed down their bakery to focus on teaching.
Sugar Geek Show has tons of free recipes for cakes on Mareks blog, as well as great tutorials on sculptural cakes in the paid section, but what makes it stand out even more are the troubleshooting and cake basics tutorials. Focusing on the fundamentals of cake making and decorating, Marek helps guide you through common issues that occur like creating airless space buttercream, leveling cakes, and how to stack cakes. There are even tutorials on how to box a cake and how to cut a cake .
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Melted Chocolate And Ganache
Chocolate is one of our favourite ways to decorate a cake. It can be melted, mixed with cream to make ganache or you can simply use cocoa powder as a light dusting for your cake. And it doesn’t have to be a chocolate cake that you cover with chocolate either – you can cover whichever cake you prefer.
Top tip: When it comes to melting chocolate, you want to keep it on a low heat and melt it gradually otherwise it’ll burn. White chocolate will melt much quicker than milk or dark as it contains more sugar. For more advice on how to melt chocolate see our handy guide.
Recipes to try using melted chocolate:
Get the recipe: Triple chocolate cake
Get the recipe: Chocolate truffle cake
Get the recipe: Chocolate dipped cupcakes
Get the recipe: Annabel Langbein’s ultimate chocolate cake
Piping Gel And Parchment Paper Are Pretty Amazing
Lori at A Cowboys Wife posted this picture along with her story of a Wilton cake decorating class. Mine is not Wilton specific which is why I chose to go with Cake Carousel however, much of what Wilton teaches is covered in my program because as my cake pop teacher stated, Wilton has some great stuff!
Essentially what piping gel does is it helps you to transfer a picture you want onto the cake. Did your child draw something and you want to have it on the cake?
Put a piece of parchment paper over it and then outline the paper with the piping gel by using your icing tip and the number 3 or 4 tip. Flip it over and use a brush to put it onto the cake.
So long as you used clear piping gel, you have the outline of your design on your cake now decorate!
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Best For Sculpted Cakes: Avalon Cakes School
Avalon Cakes School
Why We Chose It: Avalon Cakes School has tutorials for show-stopping, realistic-looking sculptures and whimsical creations that make cakes look like works of art.
ProsTutorials are easy to browseMonthly livestreaming sessionsConsMany videos seem geared toward experienced bakers
Avalon Cakes School was started by Avalon Yarnes, who started baking at age 15. Shes been featured on TV and in books and magazines, and earned the Best Novelty Cake Artist award from Cake Masters Magazine in 2014. The outlet also named her one of the top 10 cake artists in North America in 2017. Yarnes, along with a number of other talented instructors, have tutorials on how to make gorgeous sculptural cakes, ranging from hyper-realistic to whimsically cartoonish.
You can browse the cake tutorials by categories like 3D Cakes, airbrushing, gravity-defying, sculpted cakes, special effects, and more. Its the sculpted cakes, however, that are true works of art. Sample tutorials include how to make a super realistic-looking lobster, a ganache-only carved pumpkin cake, and a Frankenstein head. The detail and coloring of each cake truly make these edible works of art.
Promote Your Cake Decorating Business
Now that youre ready to start a cake decorating business, its time to promote your business.
The truth is that without customers, you have no business. So its important to make sure people know youre there. And even more important to reach out to prospective customers.
So make sure you have a plan to get your cake business and your products in front of them.
Pay attention to your Yelp page, as many people search for a company and review ratings before selecting a vendor.
Use social media to promote your cake decorating business!
Use Facebook and Google for advertising if youre willing to shell out the funds to run them. Maybe you can start by creating a Facebook page for your business to showcase your sweet creations on. But dont limit your posts to offers, either. Share suggestions,recipes and videos of how you create your cakes. Either way, you want to have content that people can share.
But remember, one of the best ways to get new customers is by word of mouth. So, make sure youre winning over your customers with great service and quality products.
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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.