Making a Cake: The Little Things

The aim of this post is to try to help Aunt Sherry with her cake making and decorating. I hope that some of this helps, even if just a little!

I made the cake pictured above on Friday for Sara's birthday. It was a yellow cake that I made in two 8 inch round pans.

After baking the cake, I let it cool for about 5-10 minutes in the pans, until the cake was cool enough to handle. That's when I transferred the cakes to a wire rack to let them cool completely. This cooling process took about 1 hour until they were no longer warm. After that, I used my cake leveling tool to make the two halves level. (My cake level is one of my favorite cake making tools. It was cheap, and it is incredible.)

While the cake was cooling, I made buttercream frosting. Since I left it in the bowl on the counter for about 15-20 minutes while the cake was cooling and it had started to stiffen, I used the mixer to re-mix it again right before I put it on the cake. I used the buttercream for the center filling (to stick the halves of the cake together) and then to frost the top and sides of the cake with a crumb coating. The point of the crumb coat of icing is to coat the cake so that you can put the finishing layer of icing over top of it later, and not have to worry about tearing the cake or getting crumbs in the frosting when you are doing the pretty layer of icing. These things often happen with the crumb coating when you don't let the cake cool enough, and then you end up having to make the layers of frosting thicker.

The other purpose of the crumb coating is to seal the moisture in the cake so it doesn't start to dry out.

You have to let the crumb coating set before putting the next layer of icing on the cake. This can take anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes, depending on how stiff you make the buttercream.

(To stiffen buttercream, add powdered sugar. If it is too stiff, add milk. You can do these things to store bought cans of frosting as well.)

While I was waiting for the crumb coat to set, I made another batch of buttercream frosting, most of which I colored pink. Then I used that to do the final layer of frosting.

The remaining white icing was used to pipe the design on the cake. I added a bit more powdered sugar to make it a tiny bit stiffer. To make the piping bag, I cut a tiny bit off of the corner of a ziplock bag, because I was being too lazy to make it out of parchment paper.

BTW - I have lost one of my frosting tips and my 1/4 cup measuring cup - I think because Connor was helping. He knows that when we are finished with some things (like diapers and Q-Tips and empty boxes, etc.) they go into the trash. We're still trying to teach him the difference between those types of things and dishes...