Zebra Cake
Making a zebra cake is a lot easier than you may think.
Using vanilla and chocolate gives you great black and white contrast, and a wonderful looking cake. Once cut is shows distinct lines and tastes great too.
Whether for a birthday or for guests coming over for dinner, this cake is sure to be a great hit.
Make sure all your ingredients for the recipe are at room temperature: Read the rest of this entry »
Bake Even Strips
If baking is not your strength in the kitchen, you may want to consider using Bake Even Strips which are designed to help your cake bake evenly and reduce the dome on top. This means you don’t have to worry about wasting any cake by cutting off the dome if you intend designing the cake or making a tiered cake. It is easier to decorate a flat surface and trying to cut a cake evenly can be a challenge.
These clever strips come in two package sizes. The first offers you two strips which cover an eight or nine inch round baking pan. The other package has four strips, one for a ten inch, one for a twelve inch, one for a fourteen inch and one for a sixteen inch. This is ideal if you want to make a tiered cake for a wedding.
Cakes baked using the baking strips tend to have lighter colored sides than cakes baked without the strips.
Wilton Sugar Sheets
No matter what the occasion whether it is an anniversary, your child’s birthday bash or just a get together of old friends, you want to be able to deliver a beautiful unique cake. Using a new product from Wilton, you are able to achieve this using sugar sheets.
Sugar sheets are flexible, edible decorating paper which you can cut or punch designs out of and use on cakes, cup cakes and cookies, bringing out the master decorating designer in you. These sheets come in a variety of bright colors or more relaxed pastel colors, as well as a choice of patterns to help you make your cake beautiful.
This is a new product which brings paper crafting to baking and desserts. Wilton punches and sugar sheets work very well together. These punches are available with interchangeable designs and you can get single shaped punches and even border punches, which are easy to use.
You don’t need any decorating experience to make a magnificent masterpiece. You will always be able to create new designs. You can create an amazing birthday cake using precut letters or punch flower or circle designs to add a bit of fun and color to your cakes.
How to Create a Water Colors Cake
Do you have someone in your life who can’t get enough of the open seas? If so, they will love the aquatic, sea-themed cake that is designed in this video. Featuring three-dimensional fish and coral decorations, it truly is a sight to behold.
The first step described in the video is the creation of the fish that sit on top of the cake. These fish are made out of rice cereal treats that are shaped into a ball. Each ball has a distinctive and festive color that is created by adding icing color to the butter as it melts.
Because marshmallows are added that will dull the color a little bit, you should make the color bolder than you’re looking for when adding it to the melting butter. The marshmallows will tone down the color as the treats are being formed. Once the ball shape is made, press the treat down onto the counter or another flat surface. This will create a flat edge on one side of the ball. This is the side that will face the cake surface.
How to Create a Pastel Posies Cake
A lot of work goes into making cakes, and cake decorators will often use up to a dozen tips in order to get just the right type of decorations on their cake. In this video, however, we learn that you can create really great cakes without tons of equipment. In fact, this pastel posies cake is made with just one tip.
The first topic discussed is what recipe to use to make a cake like this. Light citrus flavors are recommended as they complement the festive springtime decorations on this flowery dessert. Ice cream and fruit are other ideas for the flavor of the cake. Use butter cream icing to cover the cake, and once it starts to harden, take a flower-shaped cookie cutter and make a light impression into the icing. This will give you a guide shape for your decoration.
Next, take your icing bag and trace the outline of the impression that you just made with the cookie cutter. Examples are shown in the video using a round tip, and the hosts do a live demonstration using a star tip. Make sure as you are drawing the outline shape to use consistent pressure when squeezing the icing out of the bag. Outlining the flower shape isn’t a necessary part of the decoration, but it does add a nice additional visual element to the cake.
Learn The Art of Airbrushing Cakes
In the video below, we learn about airbrushing cakes with some of the basic techniques to use when adding decorative elements to a cake using airbrushing. Airbrushing is a quick and easy way to add color to a cake.
The first topic that is discussed is safety when using an airbrushing machine. The machine should be safe to use on food. This means that if the airbrushing machine has been used for anything else, such as airbrushing paint onto a surface, it should not be used for your food projects, as you can’t be completely sure that potentially hazardous materials have been completely removed from the machine.
Also, to protect your kitchen, you should make sure that counter tops and other surfaces near where you are working are completely covered with a disposable material like butcher paper.
The three elements that directly impact how your airbrushing colors will appear on the cake are pressure, angle, and speed. The best way to learn how changes to these three elements affect your work is simply to practice with them.
As a decorator, you should always lay out your design ahead of time on paper. This will help you determine what order to lay colors down in, which is important because the colors will blend. Laying down blue on top of yellow, for example, will make green.
For background colors, hold the airbrush unit six to eight inches from the cake, and use light pressure to pull the trigger while aiming the unit at a 45-degree angle to the cake. For elements that require bolder colors, hold the unit at a 90-degree angle. This forces the color to focus on a smaller area of the cake, resulting in a bolder stroke.
Stencils can also be used with airbrushing equipment. By airbrushing with stencils, you can quickly add design elements to your cake surface.
Airbrushing equipment can get expensive, and many decorators may need an inexpensive alternative. Products like Color Mist, which consist of food coloring in a spray bottle can, can be used in these cases to replicate many of the effects of airbrushing at a fraction of the cost.
You can get more information about airbrushing cakes by visiting the Wilton’s forum.
How to Make a Dazzling Birthday Cake
One fantastic way to make a dazzling day birthday cake that people will be talking about for days after your event is to add textures and other decorations that really make the cake a three-dimensional piece of art. In the video below, you will learn how to add these types of fun accessories to your birthday cakes.
Prior to building the decorations, the fondant base is added to the cake. The fondant can be made at home or purchased, and the desired thickness to roll the fondant into is between 1/8 and 1/4 of an inch. The fondant is then cut into an appropriate size to cover all sides of the cake, with a little bit left over just in case. In this video’s example, the cake has butter cream icing to cover the crevices in the cake and ensure that the fondant sticks.
Fondant can also be used to create gift-shaped decorations for your cake. Cookie cutters are used to carve the shapes out of the fondant. Icing is then used to add the ribbon to the square to make it gift-shaped.
Another fun three-dimensional decoration to add to a cake using fondant is a squiggly-shaped decoration reminiscent of confetti. To accomplish this, simply cut straight strands of fondant and wrap it around a lollipop stick. When it dries, slide it off the stick and add it to your cake.
Balloon decorations can be created using trays that mold the fondant into the desired shape. Cornstarch should be used as a layer between the tray and the fondant to facilitate drying and prevent sticking. A toothpick is then used to pop the balloon from the tray.
A dazzling technique that is covered in the video is sponging, which can be used to add a nice texture to the top or sides or your cake. To create this type of decoration, take a napkin or small paper towel, wad it up, and lightly dab it into a bowl of colored butter cream icing.
Next, simply dab the napkin lightly onto the cake so that some of the icing comes off onto the cake. If the cake is going to display a message, such as “Happy Birthday,” it may be necessary to cover the portion of the cake where the message is going with a piece of cardboard so that it doesn’t become a victim of exuberant sponging.
Want to make this cake? You can visit Wilton’s for a complete list of ingredients so you can make your own dazzling day birthday cake.
