How many of you bake cakes from scratch and decorate them fabulously?
How many of you bake cakes from scratch?
How many of you bake cakes from a cardboard box?
How many of you eat cake?
Ah, at last, someone answers “yes”, thank goodness.
I do bake cakes, from scratch, and I frost them. But decorating a cake has always been something I deferred to my local bakery. I have the artistic skills of a bad kindergarten student with defective crayons. I’m terrible. My wife Suzen won’t even let me try anymore and I am never, never to present one of my cakes to dinner guests. Too embarrassing.
Now, now all can that can change. I can finally do a superior job of decorating, dinner guests can be thrilled, and my wife will no longer be cringing.
After decades of cake miasma, what has happened? We have the wonderful New Cake Decorating book from Betty Crocker. And I do mean wonderful. Many cake decorating books are designed for people with inherent skills, and I’m just not one of those. I’m not. I need basic help. I need some serious guidance. And I need to path that will lead me to more and more ambitious cake projects.
That’s just the approach New Cake Decorating follows. The book is filled with new, colorful ideas ranging from the simple to the “major project” variety. You can start simple, learn, and graduate to very complex projects. Thankfully, even the simple cakes are beautiful. Here is the Splattered White Chocolate Cake:
Now, even I can do that kind of decorating. I just have to pretend I’m Jackson Pollock. Instead of just letting frosting dribble off that spoon, in the next level you can cleverly use the spoon as an instrument to shape the decoration in Rainbow Petal Sheet Cake:
There are many projects here to build your skills, leading you up to the grand finale like the Princess Castle:
The book is filled with idea, techniques, and of course recipes. The basics are thoroughly presented:
- How to frost a layer cake
- How to make and drizzle glaze
- How to frost a cupcake
- Chocolate decoration aplenty: curls, shaving, cut-out shapes, dipping, candy pieces, piping, molded pieces, and glazes [don’t try to do all these at once!]
- Decorating with fresh flowers and fruits.
In a half dozen pages, you have a striking set of ideas to transform your cakes from basic to photogenic.
The cakes/frosting recipes are grouped into interesting chapters.
Whimsical and Fun offers a Tie Dye Cake with vertical columns of color, a Maple-Walnut Chocolate Cake with drizzles of maple syrup, and a Pink Champagne Cake. There’s a spice cake made from scratch with dulce de leche frosting, perfectly delicious now and surely something to put on a Thanksgiving Table.
In Cutout & Shaped you transform a sheet cake — using free form templates and a sharp knife — into fun shapes that will delight children and even adults: elephants, monkeys, three-dimensional cats, puppies of all sorts including long-hairs, fish, lions, owls, skateboards, trains and that castle cake. The book cover cake is one of these: a Piñata Pound Cake with a candy core for hard-core candy fanatics.
Special Occasion Cakes are designed for surprise and recognition. The Surprise-on-the-Inside Gender Reveal Cake is for baby showers where a candy core of pink or blue candy pieces announces the coming baby’s gender in full color splendor. There’s a Red, White and Blue Layered Flag Cake that, when sliced, reveals Old Glory in profile. Gingerbread cupcakes are cut, turned on their side, assembled and united with frosting to form a Snow-Capped Gingerbread Train.
Just the Basics presents recipes for cakes and frosting: chocolate, white and yellow cakes; vanilla and chocolate glazes; and frostings aplenty: peppermint, caramel, lemon, maple-nut, fudge, fluffy white, orange, peanut butter, creaming cocoa, vanilla buttercream cherry nut and cream cheese.
It will take you more than a single month to work your way through this book, assuming you rise every morning and become your own cake baker. Perhaps you’ll explore this book a little more slowly, allowing your cake education to evolve with no pressure but with total pleasure.
New Cake Decorating is a very well-crafted, beautiful book. There are concepts here to entertain you and recipes to make you pause. Nothing can match the elegance of a cake decorated to-the-nines. And, yes, you can.