Frosting Recipes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.