Category Archives: Tips/ Tricks/ Tutorials

Tips, tricks, and suggestions for your baking and decorating!

How To Cut A Cake!

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Thats a silly title isn’t it, why would cutting a cake warrant a whole blog post! You just use a knife and slice it up, right!?
Believe it or not, there is more to it!

When you order a cake from a cake artist like me, and you would like the cake to serve 20 or 30 people, we calculate those portions in 5x5cm squares for a sponge cake, or 2.5x5cm blocks for a fruit cake.
If you aren’t sure how to cut your cake you may not get enough portions out of it.
Instead of cutting your cake into the wedges most of us use, your celebration or wedding cake should be cut along these lines to get the optimal number of servings out of it:

Cutting_Guide1_1.300192845_std

~~ graphic by Pam’s Tiers of Joy ~~

And cutting your cake this way means you should have a much easier time wrapping your cake in clingfilm in order to freeze any leftovers!

If you have a cake with more than one tier, typically a wedding or celebration cake, each tier usually has its own cake board underneath it, and using a spatula you can lift the tiers off of each other in order to cut them. The cake tiers are also usually supported with wooden or plastic dowels, and once you have de-stacked your cake you must be sure to pull the supports out as you cut it, lest someone find something inedible in their slice!
Depending on the cake artists’s methods and the weight of the cake you’ve ordered, you could find anything from 3 to 9 support dowels in your bottom cake tiers!
A two tier cake will have supports in the bottom tier (see below), a three tier cake will have supports in the bottom two tiers, and so on.

cake-tier5

~ picture by SIMPLY KHAS ~

If you are ordering a wedding cake, it might also be a good idea to check with your venue as to whether they will charge you to cut up your wedding cake for you.

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CONTACT ME!
Check out my price lists here:
~ Cupcakes ~ Cakes and Cookies ~ Sugar Art ~

My New Favourite Mixing Bowls!

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I was given a set of these bowls for my birthday by a friend, and within days they had replaced my “usual” mixing bowls as my favourites and I asked my friend where she had found them so I could go and get another set!

click, love to bake, mixing bowls

They’re available exclusively from Clicks in their Love To Bake range, and I now have a brightly coloured set and a pastel coloured set!

There are 4 bowls in the set for just R95, and here’s what I love about them:

  • They have a wide pouring lip on one side.
  • They have a handle the other side so you can hold it easily while you’re mixing or pouring.
  • They’re lightweight so even when they’re full, lifting and pouring is easy.
  • They are microwave and dishwasher safe.
  • They don’t stain – food colouring is potent stuff you know!
  • They’re deep so you don’t splatter batter or icing everywhere.
  • The base of the bowl is rounded so you don’t get batter stuck in the corners and they are easy to scrape!

They’re just plain fabulous I think!

As per my Lady Bloggers pledge – I am clearly stating here that I was not asked or paid to write any blog posts about Clicks stores or products.
I paid for my bowls just like everybody else does!

What Are Cake Pops?

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The short description?

They’re too much work and I don’t do cake pops at all, not for fun or for orders. 😀

Bakerella’s Baby Face Cake Pops

Cake pops are made by mixing cake with icing or ganache until you get a consistency you will be able to roll it into balls.
In case you missed it, that means you have to bake a cake and cool it, make the icing you would like to use – butter icing, cream cheese icing or chocolate ganache – and then mix the two together.

Bakerella’s Humpty Dumpty Cake Pops

In my experience, a cake recipe that doesn’t use a lot of, or any oil, is best. And mixing it by hand, adding a little icing at a time, makes it FAR easier to keep an eye on the consistency.
You then roll about two tablespoons of the mixture into a nice round ball (or egg, flower pot, snowman, Christmas tree, whatever shape you like) and place it on wax paper on a baking sheet. You’ll get LOADS of them… And they can’t be too big else they won’t stay on the stick.
Stick them in the freezer.

Bakerella’s Cupcake Pops

Once they’re frozen, you dip a lolly stick into some melted chocolate and then push the stick into the frozen cake balls. The chocolate hardens at the base of the ball and prevents it sliding down the stick. You also get lolly sticks with little flattened discs on them that serve the same purpose.
Then you freeze them a little more.
Then you melt chocolate, and colour it if you’d like to, and dip the frozen balls on sticks into the melted chocolate.
Rinse, repeat.
Once you have the desired chocolate coating you can decorate them.
Oil in the cake, the icing or the flavourings could seep and make cracks in the chocolate cover, so try to avoid it.

Silicone Cake Pop Pan

That funky “cake pop pan” you can buy will make gorgeous little balls of cake in all kinds of colours and flavours, but they’re not actually cake pops… And I still want the pan.

But you can’t pay me enough to make cake pops. Not ever.

Check out my price lists (for anything BUT cupcakes) here:
~ Cupcakes ~ Cakes and Cookies ~ Sugar Art ~

Baking A Cake So Its Flat On Top

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I have found several tutorials on how to do exactly this – how to bake a cake so it doesn’t rise into a dome in the middle, and how to cool it flat when it comes out of the oven.

Whilst I know some of my recipes won’t bake into a dome, my sponge cake recipes are fabulously light and soft.

And to be entirely honest with you, I LOVE it when a sponge cake rises into a perfect, smooth dome in my oven.
It tells me I mixed my ingredients just right, that my oven is at the right temperature, and that when I test it lightly with my finger it will spring back up into its beautiful shape when its done.
The thrill of delight and the sense of achievement I feel when a cake comes out of my oven perfectly is hard to match.

And when it comes time to decorate that cake, I simply slice the dome off the top using my special cake slicer and I put it aside.
When my husband and son come home from work and see me decorating a cake, or smell that I have been baking, the first thing they look for is the lunchbox full of off-cuts in the fridge!
It makes them happy and it makes me smile.

Cake is never wasted in my house!

~~tips and tricks~~

A Once-Off Workshop!

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So after many requests and much mulling over, I have decided to host a cupcake icing workshop at my house!

The details are as follows.

It will be held on Monday, 10 December 2012, at 10am, at my house in Midrand, Gauteng.
I only have room for five bookings.
Proof of payment emailed to info@thecupcakelady.co.za secures your seat and my address and directions will be mailed to you.
The workshop will most likely run for about 3 hours and I will cover basic sugarpaste modelling, using moulds for sugarpaste, and butter icing techniques.

For R700, you will get the following:

  • apron
  • a small assortment of tools including nozzles and piping bags
  • 12 cupcakes (6 chocolate and 6 vanilla)
  • 1kg of ready to use sugarpaste (fondant) in 5 different colours
  • 500g of my secret recipe white vanilla butter icing
  • 500g of my secret recipe chocolate butter icing
  • tea and coffee and a light lunch