Quality Cake Decorating

I've learned a few things in my time practicing my cake decorating skills. Here are my tips:

• Icing type and consistency matters. You can't use a recipe the consistency of glaze, it just won't work. The first cake I made for Brian ws a total disaster because I was hoping to find a new icing recipe we would love. It turned out to be a better glaze than a decorator icing and in the end I decorated the cake with a spoon. I scooped up a spoonful of "icing" and drizzled it into the approximate shape of a sailboat because I couldn't make anything more complicated. Also, that yummy cream cheese icing isn't the best for decorating either. Stick with the buttercream icing in the books.
• When making icing that needs to be colored, use the gel colors. If you use food coloring it is like adding water to the frosting and it gets really runny when you want a deep or vibrant color and add lots of food coloring. That is what happened with my very first cake, Elmo for Ben's 2nd birthday. I had to add so much red to make the frosting actually red instead of pink that it was a runny mess by the time I finished coloring it.
• Fill in the holes. Most of my cakes are made characters. I use a star tip to fill the colored sections to create the characters. When I am slow and meticulous, filling in all the white space between stars it looks great. In the sections where my hand is getting tired or my patience is growing thin I start to rush and then there are white spots of base frosting showing beneath. It really doesn make a big difference in the end presentation. I should always work slowly.
• Along that same vein, always enough time to do it right. If I'm rushed and don't have enough time to do the cake right, I won't be happy with it. I'll skimp on the time I need to color the icing just the right shade and may run out of a color because I didn't mix enough, then matching it is a joke, etc.
• When doing features that need to be distinguished from each other but are in the same color (say a characters face and neck), put a black icing line on the base frosting (forming a chin), then fill with stars tightly around the line. It will leave a gently line marking the feature but won't be so bold as to be overpowering.
• Buy the right tools. I seriously believe that the reason more people don't decorate cakes is that they don't want to do all the frosting color changes in the icing bags. So for less that $20 you can get minimally equipped to decorate cakes. Invest the money. Buy a bunch of star tips, couplers and plastic frosting bags. I now make my icing without milk, just water, then it can keep on the shelf for a long time. I mix a color, fill a bag and use it. Then I keep a large tupperware of all the frosting colors I have already made. Next time I need red, it's ready to go. Saves me a zillion hours or mixing and lots of dish washing! There, cake decoration just got really easy.
• Finally, if you make the cake ahead of time and freeze it, make sure you thaw the cake before you serve it. For Maddie's first birthday I made a cute duck cake ahead of time and had it in the freezer. Brian's parents were visiting and it was bedtime before I remembered the cake. I grabbed it out of the freezer and we tried to let her destroy the cake as most 1 year olds get the priviledge of doing. It was frozen solid. She basically got to scrap the top layer of frosting off but was unable to penetrate the icy layers of yummy cake. Oops. Oh well, it does make for a good story, just not a good video.

My cake decorating schedule:

1. Day 1 - bake cake, level, frost middle if two layer cake, put in freezer because you're too lazy to finish the base frosting layer or because you ran out of time to do it
2. Day 2 - (not necessarily the next day, just day 2 of working on the cake since I usually take a week to do a cake) frost the base layer of the cake, try to make it really smooth and pretty then throw back in the freezer because you ran out of time again
3. Day 3 - (again, just the third day of working) take the cake out of freezer the day before you need it completed, let cake thaw, moisture will collect on top of cake because of the humidity so let it evaporate away or it will look wet and shiny
4. Day 4 - (day the cake is needed, best to start with just enough time to complete the project under ideal circumstances, so that when something goes wrong, as it always does, you are rushed and crazy trying to finish it just in time), google the image you want to put on the cake, size image to fit cake, print two copies of the picture, cut the outline of the image as well as any main components of the picture, lay paper on cake and trace shape and main features with toothpick, add any other detail with toothpick tracing, color icing, fill bags with colored icing, fill each section with the star tip and proper color, take pictures, cut into pieces, add a side of ice cream and ENJOY!!