tips & tricks

When I bake cakes, my finished products rarely end up looking like the patisserie-made confections that I covet so often.  My cake layers are uneven in thickness, icing ends up in all the wrong places, and it’s almost always dotted with crumbs of cake.  Before I began baking this birthday cake last week, I decided to be proactive and look up a few expert tips for creating professional-looking results.

I found this all-inclusive list from Sweetapolita- it covers all the vital steps from prepping ingredients to perfecting design.  I won’t lie, I’ve heard most of this advice before (from my mom, of course), but oftentimes the promise of cake batter and chocolate and sugary sweet icing and sprinklessprinklessprinkles gets me a little overexcited and I tend to rush through the steps in order to get to the delicious finale of all my hard work.

This time around I decided to listen to the wise words of more experienced bakers, and while I’m not 100% thrilled with the outcome, I did manage to keep my layers relatively even and prevent the cake and the icing from mixing together in a sugary mess.  Hopefully in time I’ll be whipping up Sylvia Weinstock-worthy creations, but until then, I’ll be following these 50 tips & tricks like Gospel.