Step by step homemade baking recipes
Whether you call it frosting, icing or just buttercream, what is the trick to making BLACK BUTTERCREAM? In this episode of Buttercream Basics, Jenn Johns will show you how to make your icing BLACK with an easy hack.
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Learning how to use a shaped cake pan was how I learned to decorate cakes- so therefore, it’s how you should learn to! Hahaha!! Just kidding. Using a shaped cake pan is ONE of many ways you can learn to decorate, and since it’s the way that I’m familiar with, I chose to show you in this tutorial. When using a shaped cake pan, the lines and indentations are made for you, so the spatial piece that comes with design isn’t as tricky. There is still some amount of challenge as you have to figure out where each line is connected, but all in all, it is way easier than free-handing a complicated design.
When baking the cake batter in the cake pan, I will be honest and tell you that using a box mix is probably the better choice. For whatever chemical/preservative reason, the baked box mixes come out of the cake pan much easier than a cake from scratch does. I’d rather not think anymore about what that reason is!
There are many ways you can go about decorating a shaped cake, but I find it easiest to start with the outline, and then do the little areas that are other colours, or specific shapes etc, so once those are all done, you can quickly fill in the rest of the cake with the main colour(s).
There are a number of companies that sell shaped cake pans, but Wilton seems to lead the way in shaped Character pans. A simple Google or Amazon search will offer you hundreds of choices of characters! Garage sales or yard sales are also an excellent source of cake pans. Cake pans sometimes serve a one time birthday purpose, and then collect dust in the bottom of a cupboard. If you are lucky like me, you head to a garage sale from a former cake decorator and you hit the mother load of shaped cake pans! That is how I acquired the many shaped pans that I had, but when I stopped decorating cakes as a business, I sold them on an online site- which brings me to the point that online buy and sell sites are also great places to get cake pans. There’s no need to pay the full amount (usually $25-$50) when you can get it for $5 second hand.
As when exploring anything as a beginner, reaching perfection takes time. Don’t give up. Practice until you’ve got it perfectly decorated. And then you can thank me later. Haha!
As a kid, I remember rolling, and rolling and rolling to make the biggest and greatest snowman that I could. My brother, being 3 years younger than me, was either helping me, or trying to beat me. He was slightly competitive!
Often, our attempts were futile, as the pieces of the snowman would get so big that we could never get them off the ground and piled up on top of each other.
Once, back inside, warming up with a mug of hot chocolate, I remember looking out the window and seeing all of the tracks that the rolling snowballs made all over the lawn, and the “dead” snowballs at the end of them. . . the ones that were too heavy to roll any further, or even attempt to lift. They were often quite ugly, tube shaped and covered with brown chunks of grass that had been picked up along the way!
I haven’t done a Fortunate Friday post in quite some time and since I’m fully immersed up to my elbows in the cake world lately, I thought I would make my Fortunate Friday about all of the CAKE DECORATING TOOLS that I find helpful. . . and of course, we can’t forget the cupcakes!
Before I jump into the Cake Decorating Tools that make caking easier, I HAVE to thank Paul for the early Christmas present! You might have noticed the blog got a makeover! Isn’t it pretty!? I love it . . . thanks P! I’m so fortunate to have him <3
5 Cake Decorating Tools
1. Edible Ink Printer– This has been a tool that has come in extremely helpful. It allows the cake decorator to print pretty much ANY image onto edible paper, and place it on top of a cake or even cupcakes!
We currently use a Cannon MP640 to do our edible prints. What’s important to remember is to make sure that you do not ever put non-edible ink into the machine. The first ink that runs through the machine, must be edible ink.
Edible Inks are a specially formulated food coloring mixture for printing onto icing sheets. The colors are matched with regular inks, then modified to hold their coloring better on the icing sheets.
We get our edible ink and edible paper from Icing Images.
We have a step by step guide for you to watch on YouTube as well. Check it out here.
Bah humbug!Just kidding. I live with a bah humbugger, but I definitely don’t feel that way! But, after a week of 22, 5 year olds with Christmas excitement, I’m about ready to boycott the holiday. There are only two more days of teaching left though, so I’m sure I can make it through . . . and then I will be basking in my unlimited time time off to bake!
Unlimited? Ha! Christmas cupcakes! Christmas Cakes! Christmas Cookies! Christmas Platters! They are all on my agenda for my time away from the day job.
I have found the time to put together a couple of Christmas Cupcake videos for you to enjoy. These Christmas Cupcake ideas are dead easy. Dead! I promise. If you don’t think so, you can leave a mean comment in the comment box . . . like some people like to do! Honestly, why waste your time commenting, if all you have to say is something mean? I just don’t get it. [Read more…]
