Cake Decorating 101 – The Basics
Recipes & Directions:
- Basic Buttercream Recipe
- Italian Meringue Buttercream Recipe
- Crusting Buttercream Recipe – sets firmer than other types of buttercream (a good outer finish for wedding cakes and also good for piping buttercream borders or buttercream flowers)
- Chocolate Ganache Recipe (cover both milk/dark chocolate ganache and white chocolate ganache)
Basic Techniques:
- How to Split Your Cake into Layers and Add Your Filling
- How to Crumb Coat Your Cake
- How to Frost/Ice Your Cake with Buttercream or How to Ganache Your Cake (Cover with Chocolate Ganache) – same technique for both. While this is the standard technique for frosting a cake, other methods have since developed. One involves ganaching a cake with acrylic plates and a second method, and in Cake Geek’s opinion, the easiest and fastest way to cover a cake in buttercream or ganache, uses The Profroster tool available here. You’ll find a tutorial on how to ganache a cake using the Profroster here.
- If you’ve ganached your cake, you’ll find a tutorial on how to cover a cake with fondant icing right here. (You can also cover a buttercream iced/crumb-coated cake in fondant, but you won’t be able to achieve the “sharp edges” that are super on-trend in cake decorating, simply because buttercream doesn’t set firmly in the way that ganache does.)
- If you’re creating a extra tall/”double barrel” cake, you’ll find a tutorial to help you here: how to cover a double barrel cake with fondant. There’s also a second method for covering extra tall tiers, which you’ll find in this tutorial on the fondant panelling method.
- Lastly, we have a tutorial on how to dowel and stack a tiered cake.
Congratulations – you’ve completed Cake Decorating 101!