Add Cake Sculpting To Your List Of Accomplishments
Learning how to carve, sculpt and create realistic and sleek cakes is something you really should master if you want to be a professional cake decorator. Presenting a stunning cake, just like the one above, is going to put you at the top of everyones list when it comes to ordering bespoke cakes!
To discover how to create lovely, sculpted handbag cakes, you should give Elisa Strauss class Designer Handbag Cakes a try!
How To Fill Piping Bags
It can be pretty difficult to fill a piping bag with creamy frosting without making a mess! My trick is to use a big cup. Fit the piping bag with a piping tip, then place it in a large cup, folding the top of the piping bag around the rim of the cup. Watch me do this in my Two-Toned Frosting Rose video.
Now that youre totally equipped with this piping tips 101 guide, go pipe some frosting LIKE A BOSS!
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.
Recommended Reading: Sam’s Club Cakes Birthday
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.
From Youtube To Food Network: Local Baker Battles In ‘holiday Wars’your Browser Indicates If You’ve Visited This Link
Asia Coffee wanted to the perfect cake for her 7-year-old son. She took a decorating class at a local cake supply store and was able to complete her oldest son’s Donkey Kong cake. That experience sparked a passion for cake decorating that led the Indianapolis native to her current appearance on
Indianapolis Recorder
Read Also: Sam’s Club Cakes Wedding
How To Decorate A Cake
Now you can decorate your cake! This is actually the easiest part now that we have built our cake and frosted it so well, you have a nice clean canvas to start with!
For my cake, I placed some sprinkles into a large bowl and held my cake in my left hand. With my right hand I scooped up some sprinkles and pressed it to the sides of the cake, letting the excess fall back into the bowl. Dont worry, your cake will be ok!
Next, lets pipe some pretty rosettes for the top of the cake. I place my piping tip into my piping bag and cut off the end of the bag so the tip opening fits through the end. Dont cut too much off or the piping tip will fall out of the bag.
If you want to color your buttercream, just place a couple of big scoops into a bowl and add a couple of drops of your food coloring. Mix with a spatula until there arent any streaks left.
Next, place the bag into a cup and fold the edges down around the sides. This makes it easier to scoop some buttercream into the bag. You dont need a lot.
To pipe even rosettes, I pipe the first rosette and then turn the cake 90º so that the rosette is directly across from me. Then I pipe my second. Then I turn my cake 45º and do the same thing, basically piping directly between the first two rosettes and then I do the same on the other side. Then I just fill in the space between with two more rosettes. That way all my rosettes are the same size and spaced evenly.
The last thing I do is add some more sprinkles to the top of the cake!
How To Crumbcoat Your Cake
You may or may not have heard about a crumbcoat but for the sake of learning, Im going to explain it. I told you I wasnt going to skip anything!
A crumbcoat is a thin layer of your buttercream all over the cake to seal in the crumbs. This is an important step so that you dont get any of those crumbs in your final layer of buttercream frosting.
Place a big dollop of buttercream on the top of your cake and use your small offset spatula to spread the buttercream into a thin layer all over your cake. You dont have to be neat and tidy, just a thin coat will do. You can see there are a lot of crumbs and chunks of strawberry in this layer of buttercream, thats totally ok.
Once your cake is fully covered, you can place it into the fridge or the freezer to firm up. Once the buttercream is firm to the touch you can put on your final coat of buttercream without the crumbs getting into it.
You May Like: Mrs Fields Birthday Cookies
The Right Tools Are A Must
Your cake is never going to look professional and pretty if you dont use the proper tools. Ive learned that short cuts always fail when it comes to baking and decorating a cake. The right pans matter, using a baking strip matters, a cake turn table, offset spatula, icing bags, and icing tips are all must-haves in order to decorate a cake. Skimping on essentials will not allow you to create the cake of your dreams.
Create A Learning Plan
Gosh, there are hunks & gallons of tutorials & resources on the internet and sometimes, we can get lost in all the content. Guys, its all good and I love the unexpected videos and novel tutorials that sprout out on my feed on a daily basis, but its important to have FOCUS especially in the early phases of ones cake education. Have a cake diary and in there, create 3 lists. The first, is a TOP priority list of all the skills youd like to learn in the next 3 months. Smooth ganaching, the perfect vanilla cake, making a sugar rose..you name it. Keep in mind to be realistic with what your schedule allows. From this, you can actively pursue skills & information on these priortity topics. The second list consists of intermediate skills youd like to learn in the following 6 months. And the last list? Bucket list cake skills. The stuff cake dreams are made of.
Having a learning plan is so important. I mean think about it, school teachers dont just randomly pick topics for their students do they? Learning is done in stages, the essentials & foundations first. Then intermediate learning and finally, the tough stuff . The lists above is a very basic learning plan to ensure direction, and visible progress. As the saying goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Don’t Miss: Wedding Cake Pool Steps For Sale
Best For Variety: Cakeflix
CakeFlix provides an archive of resources for all skill levels. As a partner in CakeFlix and the primary teaching instructor, Paul Bradford has an impressive background in the field and has received numerous awards for his excellence in cake decorating and teaching, including Cake Masters Best Learning Experience on five separate occasions.
There are a number of free decorating tutorials, such as how to make and use buttercream and ganache and how to stack cakes. There’s also a selection of themed videos such as how to decorate a box explosion cake. The website also offers useful recipe calculators for baking and decorating. For access to the more than 1,000 video tutorials on the site, you will need to sign up for a membership.
There are three types of memberships: Standard, Premium, and Pro. CakeFlix offers a free seven-day trial and beyond that, membership fees range from around $7 to $30 per month.
The Pro level gives members access to business courses in addition to the tutorials. But for those just focused on learning the skills, the Standard or Premium memberships will do. New cake course tutorials are published weekly and content is never removed from the website, so as a member you will always have access to previous posts.
Learning To Decorate Cakes In 4 Steps
Walking into a gathering with a beautiful cake in your hands immediately makes you a holiday hero. Cake decorating is a wonderful skill to possess, whether youre a regular guest or more often a hostess. It can take time and patience to learn to decorate cakes, but there are tricks to making your next confection look as though youve been perfecting your skills for years!
Step 1: Use the Right Tools
Professional bakers and decorators invest in vast collections of tools to help them build beautiful cakes. You dont need a ton of accessories to make pretty cakes your family, friends and neighbors will love. Start with a turntable and either a cake spatula or bench scraper. Piping bags and a few piping tips will help you add borders to your cakes.
Step 2: Take a Cake Decorating Class
There are lots of options when it comes to learning how to decorate cakes from a professional. You can find informal tutorials online along with regimented online classes.Local bakeries often have classes as well.
Step 3: Practice Decorating Techniques
Many beautiful cake decorating techniques build on simple piping and frosting skills. You dont need to bake a cake every time you want to practice piping. Use wax paper or even paper towels as a base to become familiar with each piping tip, as well as how it feels to write with icing. Bake a batch of cupcakes to practice multiple cake decorating techniques one for each cupcake!
Step 4: Learn Simple Decoration Ideas
Don’t Miss: Ice Cream Roll Cake Baskin Robbins
Chill The Cake Layers
Taste of Home
Cold cakes are easier to frost. If you have the time, pop your cake layers into the freezer to firm up30 minutes should do the trick. Once chilled, stack and frost as normal. The cake will be sturdier and the chill will help contain some of the crumbs.
And whatever you do, never, ever frost a warm cakethe icing will melt right off.
Master The Art Of Royal Icing
This elegant 4-tiered cake is beautifully decorated with hand-piped royal icing lace. A lot of people are terrified of handling royal icing, but with time, patience, a steady hand and a little know-how, youll find yourself piping intricate lace on your own gorgeous designs. The cake above is elevated and given an extra lift and wow-factor due to the royal piping detail.
To help you master the art of creating delicate lace for wedding cakes, enroll in Zoe Clarks class Elegant Lace Cakes!
You May Like: Baskin Robbins German Chocolate Cake
Once You Learn How To Decorate A Cake You’ll Be Whipping Up Gorgeous Celebration
For special occasions, theres no better dessert than a delicious and perfectly decorated cake. While many of us enjoy visiting our favorite bakery for an elegant treat, it is absolutely possible to get stunning results right at home. All you need to learn how to decorate a cake are a few basic tools and a bit of patience.
Now, bake up your go-to layer cake, and lets get frosting.
On This Page
Best For Cupcakes: Lady Berry Cupcakes
Lady Berry Cupcakes
Why We Chose It: Lady Berry Cupcakes focuses specifically on decorating cupcakes, with each tutorial purchased individually as well as an option for a virtual live workshop or private class.
ProsSpecializes in only cupcake decoratingWid range of cupcake-focused designsLive and on-demand videosNo subscription optionExpensive
Lady Berry Cupcakes is one of the only online cupcake decorating-focused educational services out there. Based in London, the school offers in-person classes but with over 130 video tutorials that you can purchase, you are bound to find a cupcake video tutorial that suits your needs without flying across the Atlantic.
Tutorials include a basic beginner’s cupcake decorating online tutorial and one on making roses for cupcakes to videos on Peppa Pig cupcakes, Star Wars cupcakes, and 3D Jungle animal modeling videos. Each video must be purchased individually and there’s no option to subscribe. But once youve purchased the video, you have lifetime access to it.
Video prices start around $8 for the more basic design tutorials and go up to $56 for some of the specialty tutorials.
Recommended Reading: Cake Serving Guide Wilton
How The Oil And Gas Industry Has Broken Climate Educationyour Browser Indicates If You’ve Visited This Link
We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. One early spring day I was sitting in the science department of an Arkansas middle school when a representative of the state’s oil and gas industry walked in.
Slate
Next Level Off The Cake Tops
A flat cake is a heck of a lot easier to stack than a cake that has a dome top, so you need to level it off.
You can take a sharp, long, serrated knife and evenly, with the blade flat, start at the lowest part of the dome. Slice through in a push and pull motion .
Make sure to keep the blade at the same level throughout the whole cut or it will end up lop-sided.
A great trick is to leave the cake in the pan, and once its cooled, place the flat side of the blade of top of the pan and use it as a guide to hack off the top.
This method works well if the whole surface area of your cake baked higher than the pan.
Optional: stuff your face with the cake tops or pawn them off on someone else.
Also Check: Baskin Robbins Cake Kosher