Frosting Recipes » Cake Frosting Tips

Brownie Fun & Wilton Cake Decorating Yearbook 2010

sarita — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:46:20 +0000

Wilton’s 2010 Yearbook of Cake Decorating includes easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions, how-to photos, and a technique resource guide, as well as detailed product information for the inside scoop on the newest decorating gear and classic essential items. With over 200 projects, this softcover volume is the perfect gift and inspiration for the cake decorator in your life.

The Wilton® Cookbook – Brownie Fun! Book proves brownies can be as colorful and fun as your favorite party treats! In Brownie Fun!, the fudgy treats everyone loves take on amazing new shapes and dazzling colors that will be the talk of your next celebration.Brownie Fun! is packed with over 140 easy-to-make designs and recipes for brownies and mini treats. You’ll find fun shapes like flowers, footballs, burgers, volcanos and space aliens that are perfect for kids’ birthday parties.

Chocolate Cake Frosting Recipe Gone Right

sarita — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:19:38 +0000

Green Your Plate has a great story of their struggles with making a fluffy textured chocolate frosting. As you know, it’s not just the quality of ingredients you use that makes a great frosting. It’s also knowing how and in what order to combine the ingredients so they reach the desired texture. You work to bake a light, even cake, so you don’t want to ruin it with a heavy, gloppy frosting.

What really took this frosting from glop to great is careful sifting of flour and “awakening” the cocoa powder with the right amount of water.

Here’s Green Your Plate’s Chocolate Frosting Recipe. Be sure to check out the full article and photos after the jump.

Fluffy Chocolate Frosting
Adapted from the Chocolate Cake Mix Doctor

This recipe makes 1 1/2 cups, enough to frost a 2-layer 6 inch diameter mini-cake.

Ingredients:
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3 T. boiling water
4 T. (1/2 stick) butter, room temperature
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
1/2 tsp. pure vanilla extract

Pour the boiling water over the cocoa powder and stir it together to combine. Let the mixture sit for a couple of minutes to cool down, then add the butter and mix on low speed until it is combined (this takes less than a minute).

Then, add the powdered sugar and vanilla and mix on low speed for another minute so that the powdered sugar is incorporated into the mixture. Turn the speed up to medium and beat the frosting for a couple more minutes until the mixture lightens in color and turns fluffy. The longer you beat it, the lighter it will get.

Green Your Plate: It’s the frosting, stupid!.

Wilton 12 Piece Cupcake Decorating Set

sarita — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:23:40 +0000

From Wilton, the most trusted name in cake decorating: Wait until you see how much fun cupcakes can be using the decorating tips! Just place tips in the bags included, fill with icing and follow the easy decorating instructions. You’ll create all kinds of fun frosting designs perfect for celebrations or everyday treats. Includes 4 tips and 8 disposable bags for basic decorating, plus instruction booklet. Available at Meijer.

Wilton 12-Piece Cupcake Decorating Set

Fabulous Cake Frosting Demo Video

sarita — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:45:47 +0000

This very informative video takes you through the steps of frosting the top and sides of a round cake with buttercream frosting. It’s great to see the way the turntable is set up and how she uses each of the cake frosting tools.

Perfect Piping: Cake Frosting Borders That Look Great

sarita — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:09:08 +0000

When it comes to cake decorating and icing techniques, a picture or video is worth a thousand words.

Good Housekeeping has a series of cake decorating slideshows and step-by-step videos that beautifully illustrate some great techniques you can use at home.

For example, piping dots around the border of a cake can look so elegant, but it requires some technique. How and where you hold the pastry bag, as well as how much pressure you exert, affects how your icing comes out. This particular slideshow also includes how to make cake border decorations like dots, squiggles and chains that don’t look like there’s been an accident.

Icing Piping Techniques – Dessert Decorating Ideas – Goodhousekeeping.com.

Cupcake Frosting Tips Always Useful

sarita — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:15:28 +0000

Using special patterned pastry bag tips, and colorful baking cups are just a few helpful cupcake frosting tips we came across in this article.

Also suggested is improvising with a ziploc bag if you don’t have a pastry bag. This is also nice because some pastry bags can be large and difficult to control. However, you may not be able to use the decorative tips on a ziploc bag.

“For a fancy touch, add food coloring to coarse decorating sugar, which is available at specialty shops. Pour the tinted sugar into one palm, and twirl the frosted cupcake’s edges through the sugar with your other hand. Wearing gloves keeps icing from sticking to your fingers.”

Cupcake frosting tips – Taste – The Modesto Bee.

Cake Frosting Gone Wrong!

sarita — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:40:33 +0000

Anyone who has ever made or purchased a cake, or even celebrated a holiday with a cake, will get a laugh out of this article and its subject, Cake Wrecks. You can only imagine the cake frosting mishaps and miscommunications that have given rise to these hilarious cakes.

Misspellings and pro baking train wrecks are the focus of Cake Wrecks, a blog and new book.

“Fortunately for Ms. Yates, an enormous number of those problems go unnoticed. She said she receives 50 to 60 Cake Wrecks submissions a day via e-mail, and usually posts between one and five photos each weekday morning. She posts only professionally made cakes (“It’s too easy and mean to go after your Aunt Sally’s cake wreck,” she said) and nothing excessively gory or obscene.

Much of the joy in following Cake Wrecks comes from Ms. Yates’s wry assessment of every plopped-out flower and bug-eyed snowman. She is particularly savage about punctuation mishaps, like when a baker omitted an exclamation point after the inscription, “Way To Go Bob.” Ms. Yates wrote, “Just try to read this cake without sounding sarcastic. Yeah. Exactly.” Beneath a Father’s Day cake that starkly announced “1 Dad,” the caption read, “Of all the Dads out there, you are one of them.”

Cakes Gone Wrong – Buttercream-Frosted Disasters – NYTimes.com.

Wilton Cake Decorating Courses

sarita — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:12:03 +0000

If you can’t make it to the Wilton School in Darien, Illinois for their cake decorating courses and workshops, you’ll also find their four session cake decorating class taught locally. Here’s an overview of the four-course program. Each course consists of four sessions and sound like great fun.

Course 1: Discover Cake Decorating

Your Instructor will show you the right way to decorate, step by step. You will share the fun with other students, who encourage you along the way. As you learn each new decorating skill, you will gain a sense of pride in your accomplishments. Plus, you will be able to share your delicious results with family and friends!

Course 2: Flowers and Borders

Create lovely new flowers like rosebuds, daisies, daffodils, mums and more. Use these flowers in a grand finale — an impressive flower basket cake using the interwoven basketweave technique.

Course 3: Fondant and Tiered Cakes

Begin with intricate accents such as embroidery and lace, stringwork, garland and ruffle borders. Discover the beauty of decorating with rolled fondant — for covering cakes with an immaculate smooth surface and shaping fun figures and elegant flowers.

Course 4: Fondant and Gum Paste

You will see how to use tools to cut and shape amazing textured ribbons and borders. Each new technique will prepare you to decorate a Grand Finale cake you will be proud to take home.

Check the Wilton site for a class location near you.

Faking the Fondant: A Step-by-Step Cake Guide

sarita — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:45:26 +0000

This effective cake frosting technique at Cakecentral involves paper towels and a homemade tool made from a plastic soda bottle. Sounds unlikely, but it yields great results. You end up with a wonderfully smooth finish with buttercream frosting, that is primed for any decorations you like.

Be sure to check out their homemade cake dummy, a durable form made of polystyrene house insulation.

How To Create Faux Fondant (The Paper Smoothing Towel Method / Viva) | Cake Decorating Articles.

Fun With Fondant Icing: Gromit Style

sarita — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:03:59 +0000

The Frosted Cake’n Cookie is the site of a highly-skilled self-taught cake decorator in Indiana. Those hot Midwest summers don’t really lend themselves to detailed fondant work. But she’s created these excellent fondant-adorned Gromit cupcakes for her daughter’s 9th birthday party.

If you’re not yet a fan of the fondant, it’s a pliable confection often used in cake decorating as well as candies. Its smoothness and doughiness makes it a beautiful way to ornament cakes beyond your wildest dreams.

This site gives fantastic step-by-step fondant instruction with awesome photos. You’ll see that the Gromit design and fondant assembly is pretty simple and easy to follow.

thefrostedcakencookie: Tuesday Toppers: Gromit Cupcake.