So I just had my first experience baking/decorating a birthday cake for my niece. It was an 11 x 15 rectangular store-bought (she wanted strawberry) cake with homemade buttercream (1 part each of butter/crisco, 2 parts powdered sugar, vanilla).
These were the problems I had:
• Cake was the most moist, delicious cake I’ve had in a long time. I added 1 package of dry pudding mix to 2 boxes of cake mix. That was a win. However, the cake was significantly sunk in the middle. How do I avoid this?
• Buttercream: where do I start?
-First of all, I hate the flavor of this recipe. Too much butter flavor- feels like eating a stick of butter. How do I get the kind of frosting that’s lighter and has just a hint of butter flavor? What would the recipe adjustment be? (it seems like adding more crisco would make it taste nasty…)
-Secondly, it started to melt and get soupy! Do I need to decorate cakes in a meat locker with this stuff? I was in a 68 degree house trying to work with this and it turned into mush. WTH?
• My sister recommended a “crumb coat”- where you put down a very thin first layer of frosting to “lock down” the crumbs. And then proceed from there. Does his really work? She suggested it after I got started, and it may have been a good idea- I feel like I used more frosting than I needed to avoid crumbs.
•What’s the best way to “map out” a design?
Here’s a pic of the finished product. It was supposed to say “Hello Kitty” at the top but the frosting was so soft and I was so pissed at that point that I eliminated it and just stuck the candles up there. I’d give myself a B- for my first attempt!
Crumb coats absolutely help, although I think a lot of box mixes produce a cake that is so light and so moist, it can be a real PITA to frost. You may want to consider freezing the cake layers, putting on a crumb coat, then letting that set in the fridge before the final frosting.
They sell metallic strips to put around your pan that will help things bake more evenly. It’s difficult to tell sometimes why a cake sinks-- could be that too much air was whipped into the batter? could be that the batter itself was too thin?
To firm up a simple American buttercream, the advice is usually “ADD MORE POWDERED SUGAR!” but then you end up with something sickeningly sweet. I prefer a tried and true swiss meringue buttercream, but it is VERY buttery so it’s probably not for you.
ETA: I just looked at your picture and I think that cake is absolutely adorable. Nice job!
Totally adorable, I’d never have guessed that was your first cake.
Crumb coats definitely help. Make the icing quite thin for the crumb coat and let it dry a bit before applying the regular frosting.
Cake sinkage can happen for a large number of reasons: a cake is basically a floury souffle and it doesn’t take much to make it lose its willpower in the central region. A draft in the oven from opening the door early in baking, batter that’s too liquid or over-aerated by beating, underbaking or temperature too low, etc.
You need to experiment with a variety of frostings if you want to get away from the standard buttercream which tends to be, I agree, either too buttery or too sweet. Seafoam icings or royal icings are alternatives that can work well depending on the cake flavor, as can the more strongly-flavored cream cheese icings and chocolate icings. Try them out and see what you like (and what holds up best). For sheer durability, you can’t beat fondant, but nobody really likes to eat it all that much.
Designs are best planned with a drawing on paper and then roughly “sketched” on the base layer of frosting with a toothpick or bamboo skewer. Taking pains with the symmetry and spacing is probably the single most effective and easy thing you can do to get a professional-looking cake.
Should be more like 8 parts sugar. Stick of butter/ half-cup crisco/ 4 cups sugar/ vanilla. Cream and add just a tablespoon or two of milk to moisten it back up. I’m amazed you had such a good result working with frosting in that ratio, it must have been like soup.
I don’t do crumb coats myself, but I know some people love them. As for the sunken cake, there’s lots of possibilities, but one of them is a sudden temperature change. If you open and close your oven a lot while it’s baking, stop that.
First of all, that’s a very nicely decorated cake, so please don’t be so hard on yourself.
Second, if you want to practice piping, buy a big can of el cheapo shortening. Warm it just a little, and the texture is almost the same as buttercream. You can use it for piping practice (cookie sheets or upside down lasagna pans are great for this), then scrape it up and re-use almost indefinitely.
Again, if you go to the Wilton website, you can find many answers there. They recommend
1/2 cup solid vegetable shortening
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter or margarine softened
1 teaspoon clear vanilla extract
4 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar (approximately 1 lb.)
2 tablespoons milk
for a basic buttercream (so NOT 1:1:2). I would do the basic buttercream for the main frosting and decorate with the Crisco/powdered sugar stuff until I was used to doing it.
No matter what classes you take, they all emphasize PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE. Now, when there is no pressure, make a bunch of cakes and practice decorating them. You can also practice decorations on waxed paper, then scoop them up and put them back in the pastry bag to practice some more.
I used this recipe from the “what’s wrong with cake frosting these days” thread:
[QUOTE=Baker]
I cream together one part by weight of shortening and butter each, to two parts of powdered sugar. So it would be, say, 6 ounces butter, six ounces shortening, and twelve ounces powdered sugar. After this is thoroughly creamed together(I use a mixer and paddle) I usually add a little light cream, as the icing may still be too stiff. But add it gradually, beating some more, until it reaches the spreadability you want. I flavor the icing with a little almond extract, not vanilla, as it gives the icing a distinctive taste, but vanilla is of course good too. The flavoring is added with the light cream.
[/QUOTE]
It looked great when I finished beating it, but fell apart as I used it. I didn’t have to add any milk of any kind to make it more spreadable which seemed weird to me. It did get overcold when I set it outside to make room for it in the fridge, but I let it thaw a little and then I re-beat it- could this have caused a problem?
I did open the door :eek: as my dumb apartment oven doesn’t have a window! I will avoid this next time! I have some of those magic cake strips and had used them on the test run cake, but that one fell too (I opened the door that time too :eek: )
[QUOTE=Kimstu]
Designs are best planned with a drawing on paper and then roughly “sketched” on the base layer of frosting with a toothpick or bamboo skewer.
[/QUOTE]
And the crumb coat would also make a perfect canvas for sketching out the design- it’s all making sense now!
Thanks, all for your input, and if I can get any more feedback on the frosting recipe/frosting problem, I’d appreciate it.
Thanks for the compliments. There were tears and there was lots of swearing (yeah, I’m really hard on myself), but after I slept on it, I realized it looked pretty cute for a first-timer.
Baker is a pro and maybe what works for her won’t work for a beginner? Or maybe she was referring to a basic frosting but not one that is ideal for decoration. IMO (and it’s only my admittedly limited experience) it’s better to start out with a stiffer (and probably too sweet for you) frosting. When you have several cakes under your belt, you can experiment with other frostings. But I think you’ll have to stick with a fairly stiff frosting for flowers and other add-ons.
I seem to remember that there is powdered egg whites that can be added in small amounts to frosting to increase the holding power. I don’t remember if it is used for buttercream.
I know I sound like a broken record with the Wilton stuff, and I’m not affiliated with them in anyway. But the website is a god-send for ideas and solutions. They push their own products (of course). And their classes through Michaels were really not very expensive when I took them (I think I bought the kits and the classes were $25 more.) Even if you don’t intend to make a bunch of flowers ever again.
I took the Wilton classes years ago and had a blast. My coworkers got to eat cake the day after class, so it was win-win all the way around!
I honestly don’t think icing is meant to taste good. It is only for LOOKS. Because it’s made with shortening and powdered sugar, it’s technically edible, but it’s nasty stuff. Only little kids enjoy eating it, and they fight over the flowers.
When you are doing a full-bore, take-no-prisoners cake decorating, you use a HELLUVA lot of icing. Nobody expects people to eat all that crap!
Just make something that looks incredible, and stand back for the compliments!
~VOW
My cakes fell in the middle if someone slammed the door to the kitchen too hard.
Never have made buttercream frosting, so I cannot help you there…I always made the frosting with butter, confectioners’ sugar, extract, (for chocolate, cocoa powder) and a dribble of milk. Bundt cake was basic drizzle icing…milk and confectioners’ sugar boiled to a thin consistency…
I have nothing to add except that your cake looks beautiful! That’s totally Hello Kitty right there on a cake that you made with your own hands! Awesome.
I came in here to tell you to look at the Wilton website, but I see others have beat me to it. When I took a cake decorating class we beat it with the mixer’s slowest speed, and for like ten minutes. You have to be extremely careful with the liquid. One drop makes a difference.
I asked my mother and she said she used a mix of butter and wait for it -> lard???
She also said, that you have to whip lots of air into it. And the biggest mistakes are too much sugar and too much frosting itself. The idea is to use as little as possible and let the sweetness from the cake provide the flavor.
My opinion: If you are going to do a two-layer, homemade, “Happy Birthday” cake, then yes, make delicious icing. That’s the time for German chocolate cake with the ooey-gooey pecan/coconut stuff. All-butter butter cream, rich cocoa, melted baker’s chocolate, go full bore.
But if you want to do a DECORATED cake, you make the Crisco “buttercreme” and you’ll use LOTS of the stuff to give yourself a smooth surface for artwork. And then the artwork will be constructed of LOTS MORE “buttercreme” to create the roses, the lattice, the basketweave, the shells, the loop-de-loop, all of the decorating standards.
In the Wilton classes, making the “buttercreme” with Crisco is recommended, because Crisco can withstand the temperature changes of you holding that cake decorating bag forever and it will give no “off” flavor to the finished product. Store-brand, generic shortening is temperamental and may not cooperate with extensive decorating.
Adding a stick of butter to the frosting recipe does make it taste better. But the product will not be as cooperative as an all-Crisco frosting. When it’s cold, it will be very difficult to pipe from the decorating bag. And since decorating a cake can take an enormous amount of time, most people don’t feel comfortable with butter being unrefrigerated for very long.
When I took the Wilton’s classes, we were given the opportunity to accommodate the fact that the “buttercreme” icing is rather BLEAH. We made ten-inch single layer cakes which were split and filled. And with the fillings, we were encouraged to go wild. Canned pie fillings were a popular choice. My favorite was a lemon cake with blueberry filling. End result: everyone stood around and went “Ooooh! Ahhhh!” over the decorated cake. Then the cake was sliced, and the consumers scraped off the ton of “buttercreme” and indulged on the delightful cake with accompanying filling. They remember the spectacular decorating job and the delicious cake, and nobody remembers the icing.
~VOW
