I’ve been handed the family birthday cake decorating baton and am pretty excited about it. For Christmas I got a huge Wilton cake decorating kit and a boatload of Wilton colors and my first project is coming up!
For my first run I’m going easy on myself and doing a box cake mix and store-bought frosting. This is not how I normally roll- I love to make from scratch, but I need to keep the pressure low for my first time. The requested design is Hello Kitty- easy! If I was a veteran, I’d cut out a Hello Kitty shape and go to town, but again, staying with the rectangle this time to make it a little easier for me.
The decorating part, I feel, will be relatively easy. I’m an art school grad and can pimp out some artistic decoration (one of the reasons I got this “job”). I bought 3 different kinds of frosting: The first one I hated and didn’t use- awful flavor/consistency, the others were Duncan Hines Creamy Homestyle Vanilla (good texture but not my favorite consistency/flavor- tastes a little like store-bought. Fair enough.) and Betty Crocker Whipped Buttercream (silky texture, gets soft when warm which could be problematic however I can rotate bags from the fridge- cake will be decorated day of party. Flavor is great but color is a little bit yellow-y, problematic when needing white). I tested out all the tips, played around, and picked my favorites to use on this cake.
Over the weekend I baked a test cake in an 11 x 15 Wilton aluminum pan, which used 2 boxes of cake mix. This did not go so well. Next time will use parchment paper on the bottom- cake stuck to the pan. I have some of those insulated “magic strips” to wrap around the pan, but they didn’t work, really. Sides puffed up and middle had to catch up (the antithesis of what those strips usually produce for me). Cake seemed a little over-brown in the end, and a bit dry. I know I left it in too long- I was trying to adjust cooking time based on pan size and overshot the estimate. The cake part definitely needs work.
So- questions:
Should I have bought a better pan? This pan seems a little thin. I bought it because it came with a cover (Wilton brand)
Any tips on length of time/oven temp for an 11 x 15 cake?
Any tricks for a moister cake? (this cake mix is Pillsbury Moist Supreme and claims to have 1 cup pudding in the mix. The other was Betty Crocker Super Moist Lemon cake- I should have tested using the cake I’m going to ultimately use, but my niece requested strawberry and that sounded gross- haha)
Someone suggested GFS cake mix. But the niece requested strawberry and I’m guessing GFS doesn’t have every flavor under the sun.
Any other sage advice? From-scratch frosting and or cake recipes that work well for you?
Wow, you’ve got a lot of questions here. Let me take them one by one:
The cake? You definitely need a dedicated metal cake pan, first of all. Aluminum is too thin. It buckles. Things tend to stick to it, no matter how much you spray it.
A cake will “hump” in the middle if the oven is too hot. Through trial and error, I’ve discovered my oven runs maybe 5-10 degrees hotter or colder than the temperature it’s set. I don’t fiddle with it – I check on what’s in there and adjust accordingly. For an 11x15 cake, figure a little longer than what the back of the box says for a 9x13. If I were you’d I’d start checking it with a toothpick – or better, a skewer – maybe 5-7 minutes after going past the 9x13 time.
The other thing – and you’ll discover this yourself the more you bake and decorate – most boxed cake mixes will be your enemy because they’re simply too moist and crumbly to decorate, even when cool. Professional at-home decorators have a lot of tricks up their sleeve to combat this. The universal solution is to add a box of instant pudding to the dry cake mix. The cake will turn out firmer without losing much moisture. It will also crumble less when you decorate it. You can vary flavors – say, using lemon pudding mix with yellow cake, or augmenting chocolate cake with chocolate pudding. Too bad there isn’t a strawberry pudding
As for frosting/icing – please, PLEASE, don’t use canned. It’s too soft for decorating. What you need is good old-fashioned buttercream icing (IMO). There was a thread around here not too long ago which discussed different types of icing, and IIRC a few people posted their recipes. Something to consider
If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask. There are a few of us here who professionally bake for a living
I took 2 Wilton classes at Michael’s and while I don’t think their “frosting” is particularly tasty, it works for what it is supposed to do and is remarkably lasting and forgiving. And it lasts forever (well, months) if left in the fridge. Of course, now I would make a real buttercream frosting.
A good place to start for tips and ideas is the Wilton site. Most character cakes are completed using the star pattern (tip 16). Just fill in the pattern with thousands of tiny stars. There are lots of additional patterns to try, but I’d start easy as it will take more time than you expect. Whatever tips you use, test them out on parchment paper to be sure your technique and pressure are correct.
I think you really need to get some quality cake pans. Mine are all fromChicago Metallic and work really well. I line them with parchment and never have sticking issues.
I originally read the OP as having a Hello Kitty-shaped pan. Since you have a regular pan, I’d bake two layers and stack them with some yummy stuff, although you can bake one layer and slice it to 2 layers. In either case, level the top by cutting off excess cake.
I don’t think you can do any detailed decorating with canned frosting. The ‘standard’ American buttercream recipe is super easy, mostly just butter and powdered sugar (can cut with some shortening for a sturdier (and waxier) frosting).
