Cake for Dummies, part 3: frosting and stacking

I’ve made a “Cake For Dummies” page where I’ve linked to all the cake tips and resources on my blog, including those on tiered cakes and general baking tips.  You can find the past videos from this series there if you have missed anything and would like to catch up.  The first video includes my “water bottle trick” for ensuring a moist cake every time, and the second covers levelling.  Now we’re up to frosting and stacking (which also includes a water bottle trick-I tell you that water bottle is my secret weapon!)–3/4ths of the way to a finished cake!  Tomorrow is the final video and will cover “decorating.”  I put that in quotations because my decorations are more like embellishments, but it still makes for a pretty cake, and is much more manageable for those without decorating experience.

OK, I’m a big dork.  While frosting the cake, I got caught up in telling a story about my childhood when I should have been explaining what I was doing. I think by this time, I had lost my focus and forgot I was doing a tutorial.  Oops.

Allow me to explain in writing. :)  When you spread on your frosting, you want to make sure you don’t get any crumbs in it.  If you do get crumbs in it, it’s not the end of the world, it will still taste great, but it won’t look as nice.

Just say no to crumbs in your frosting!

{Photo source}

To keep them out, you have three options:

1) Apply a thin coat of frosting over the whole cake to trap the crumbs before you apply a thicker layer.  This is not my method of choice because it seems too time consuming to have to apply the frosting twice, but it works.  Just be sure to refrigerate the cake for an hour or up to overnight after applying the crumb coat before you frost it again.

2) Pipe the frosting on using a large pastry bag fitted with a wide, flat tip, such as Wilton’s #789. This gives you an even thickness of frosting over the entire cake, and there is no risk at all of getting crumbs in your frosting because the cake is covered already when you start using your spatula to smooth it out.

3) Be careful and just go for it.  On the rare occasion that I don’t use a pastry bag & frosting tip to pipe the frosting on, this is what I do.  I just put a lot of frosting on each spot before I start spreading it and don’t spread it very thin, adding more before I get to the point when the crumbs start lifting up as I move the spatula.  I make sure that my spatula never comes into contact with the cake itself, and I avoid lifting my spatula in a way that pulls the frosting (and crumbs) off the cake.  This is the method you’ll see me demonstrate in the video.

Links that accompany the video:

The turntables: older versions of Wilton’s Trim ‘n Turn PLUS Cake Turntable and Trim ‘n Turn ULTRA Cake Turntable

The frosting tip: Wilton #789

The cake I’m making: Dark Chocolate Raspberry Cake

Check out this recipe using the leftovers from this cake: Dark Chocolate Raspberry Cupcake Bites

OK, that’s it for today-class dismissed!