Cake Tips and Tricks

colour wheel

Before I get into the nitty gritty details of cake decorating, I want to state a quick disclaimer: I’m still learning! I’m improving every single day and I always will be. However, I have picked up a lot of little tips and tricks over the years from my experiences in culinary school, while working, and honestly, because of a lot of failure. Here in this blog post I have compiled all of the things I wish I knew when I was just starting out:

Baking Tips:

1. Soaking your cakes in a flavoured simple syrup is a great and very effective way of getting a lot of any flavour into a cake. (ex. earl grey cake? Soak the cake in earl grey tea or earl grey simple syrup!)
2. There are only two ingredients that really need to be sifted because they clump very easily: powdered sugar and cocoa powder.
3. If you’re making a cake with baking powder, the batter can sit out and it will be okay. If you’re making a cake with baking soda, it’s best to bake the batter as soon as you can.
4. Cake sinking in the middle? It's probably a) there's too much leavener or b) you opened the oven while it was baking.
5. Flip your cakes out of the pan 10-15 minutes after they come out of the oven. Leaving them in the pan too long can give your cakes a dense–(Mary Berry voice)–and soggy bottom.

​Buttercream Tips:

1. Learn and perfect the meringue buttercream recipes. When I was just starting out, I used exclusively American buttercream because it’s all I knew! I was constantly frustrated because the buttercream would always be tinged yellow and because I could never get it smooth. Meringue buttercreams solve all of those problems.
2. ​If you are making an American buttercream, beat the living hell out of your butter before adding the icing sugar. Whipping air into it will make the butter fluffy and white.
3. Keep your buttercream layers to about ½ the thickness of the cake layer for a perfect cake-to-buttercream ratio.
4. Buttercream transferring is one of my favourite techniques, utilize it! It allows you to achieve incredible detail with just buttercream. Just remember to mirror the image so that it comes out the right way when you flip it onto the cake.
5. Cut little squares of parchment paper to stick to a rose nail and build your buttercream flowers on top of it. Then you can easily pull up the parchment paper and transfer the flowers to a baking sheet to chill. From there, you can peel the paper off and apply the flowers like stickers onto a cake!
6. Accidentally nick your cake and put a dent in it? Don’t freak out, just immediately chill the cake until it is rock solid. Once  cold, use soft buttercream to fill in the hole and patch it up!
7. Smooth out the buttercream on the top of a cake first, make sure you’re happy with it before smoothing the edges because it's harder to fix the top once your sides are smooth.
8. To get the sharpest buttercream corners of all time, smooth out the top of your cake first. Then smooth the sides allowing a lip to form around the top. Chill the cake adequately until it is rock solid. Then take a very sharp paring knife and carefully cut off that top lip of buttercream until it's flush with the top of the cake. (video tutorial at the bottom of the blog post!!!)

Colour Mixing Tips:

1. Buy black and red fondant. Don’t try to colour it yourself unless it’s a small amount. It’s not worth the stress guys.
2. ​When mixing fondant colours, it’s easier and usually more successful to mix different coloured fondant pieces together as opposed to adding food colouring.
3. Put your alcohol in a dropper bottle! It makes it so much easier to control how much you’re adding when you’re mixing paints or lustre dust. I got mine here.
4. Look at this colour wheel to the right. Memorize it. Understanding basic colour theory makes mixing colours a million times easier. 
5. Start trying to look at colours and identifying if they’re “warm” or “cold.” Being able to identify colour warmth will really help you mix colours. If a colour is too “warm,” add blue. If a colour is too “cool,” add yellow or red.
6. Adding more of a food colouring colour will make the colour more saturated. To make the colour darker, add a touch of black.
7. Brown/ivory food colouring is your best friend. Adding it to a colour often makes it look more natural.

Fondant Tips:

1. Smooth fondant using a small ball of fondant. Flat fondant smoothers sometimes can't reach those weird places or get those weird angles–fondant balls can!
2. After kneading fondant, pull all the cracks to the bottom and make sure the ball is smooth on top. Roll it out to use and all the cracks will all be hidden underneath.
3. Use cornstarch to roll out your fondant and make it less sticky, not icing sugar. Cornstarch won't melt and get all sticky like icing sugar will.
4. Make your own cornstarch powder poof by putting cornstarch in a (NEW) sock or wrapping it up in a towel and bunching the towel on the top.
5. When putting fondant on a cake, secure the top first and then immediately secure the edges underneath the corner. The corner is where fondant is most likely to rip so securing it to the buttercream right underneath the corner will prevent the weight of the fondant from ripping it. 

Sculpting Tips:

1. When sculpting anything, look at the subject and try to segment it into simple shapes in your head. 
2. Balled up tinfoil is a great texturizer. So are piping tips! And so is almost anything you can find around the house, get creative! 
3. I know it's not possible 100% of the time, but having a 3D model of what you're sculpting makes it much easier. Sculpting a strawberry? Buy a strawberry.
4. Don't have brown powder colour to dust with? Cocoa powder baby!
5. Add cornstarch to powder colours to lighten them up if they're too dark!

As a bonus, I have included a few cookie tips too! 
​
Cookie Tips: 

1. When baking sugar cookies for decorating, don't add baking powder! It will encourage spreading, which you don't want when you've spent all this time cutting your beautiful cookie shapes!
2. Put water in a spray bottle to achieve the correct royal icing consistency! Adding too much water is always the biggest mistake. Having a spray bottle is the easiest way to add very small amounts of water to royal icing to reach the perfect consistency.
3. I struggled with royal icing colours bleeding a lot until some very talented cookie decorators informed me that the trick is to dry the cookies in front of a fan! It’ll force them to crust over quickly which will prevent the bleeding.
4. No-tip piping bags are the best for cookie decorating. They need to be made of an incredibly thin plastic to work without a tip. These are the ones I use.
5. Use the paddle attachment to mix your royal icing not the whisk attachment. The whisk adds too much air and makes more bubbles.

I hope that these tips are able to help you out if you're just diving into the world of cake decorating and don't know where to start. The best tip I can give anyone is just to practice. Do it over and over again and you'll slowly start to feel yourself improve. Cake decorating is not typically a hobby that offers immediate gratification. The first cake you ever make won't be good, but you should be proud of it anyway. If you use any of these tips, tag me on Instagram! I'd love to see your creations! 

---