It's Gonna Need More Than One Coat- Week 1

There are so many plusses and minuses to cake decorating. Starting off with the plusses (my favorite) the simplicity of it. Decorating a cake can be as simple as just a little bit of frosting to spice up the flavor. That’s it. And I am relieved that my first week encompasses those simple frosting techniques. Although, the downside of this does mean that at some point, I will have to face the complexities like fondant and making shapes out of the cake. But, we are not there yet and week one was a piece of cake…literally.

Although simply frosting a cake may seem easy, it is most definitely not. I decided to start the first week off by frosting a batch of cupcakes rather than jumping straight into the cake. See, by using a cupcake I am able to get 24 mini-cakes to practice on. So it’s okay if I happen to screw up the first 23 cupcakes (trust me, it’s been done), because I still have that final cake to make up for the mistakes. But you cannot do that with a cake. If you mess up, you have to bake a whole new cake, and that’s just a waste of time. So please, fancy the simple, yet complex, art of the frosting.

Crumb Coat

Sometimes perfecting and learning the basics is the easiest way to get by in the world. The crumb coat can turn your final decorated cake from “eh, that’s neat” to “WOW! Where can I learn that?”

So, what really is a crumb coat? A crumb coat is the base coat of icing to a cake. Some refer to it as the dirty icing, which sounds gross to me. I’ll stick to crumb coat. So a crumb coat is not very difficult. It is typically used for layered cakes to help keep all the crumbs under the first coat of icing so it does not mess up any following decorations you may have. A typical birthday cake will have two layers of frosting, the first being the crumb coat. By using the crumb coat, it makes the final product more clean and less rough or dirty.

The crumb coat is really quite simple. You’re supposed to have a cake board and a turntable and a bunch of other fancy tools. But, the gist of it is you take a relatively large glob of frosting and you just plop it right on the top of the cake or cupcake. With layered cakes, the frosting that binds each later together is spread around the sides and taken off. The one trick to the crumb coat is that every once in a while, you must clean the offset, or angled, spatula so that you are not frosting any crumbs into the cake.

This video I found, which is actually part of a whole cake decorating series, shows the crumb coat step of the cake decorating process. It will be the first of many of the videos I will show you in this series. Buckle you’re seatbelts, you’re in for a ride!!

Lastly, the most ideal step of the crumb coat. It must must must muusstt be chilled after. Anything above 20-30 minutes will do the trick. It’s ideal because if you do not let the frosting chill, your second layer of frosting will mess with the crumb coat. All your hard work for the smooth decoration is thrown away and you end up with a messy cake once again.

Possible Benefits

I was really happy on Sunday night when I happened to stumble across a CNN article. It was called “This is your brain on crafting” and it talked about a lady that had PTSD and picked up knitting as a hobby to get away from thinking about the trauma she went through. The article further develops into how crafting can “help those who suffer from anxiety, depression, or chronic pain… it may also relieve stress, increase happiness…” (cnn.com). My immediate thought was that I was so relieved to read that. Cake decorating is clearly crafting, no matter how simple or complex the baker makes it. But I read on, and the article quotes a clinical neuropsychologist. It was Catherine Carey Levisay, I don’t know if you know her, but she is married to the CEO of Craftsy.com. Anyway, Levisay says, “There’s promising evidence… that creating – whether it be through art, music, cooking, quilting, sewing, drawing, photography (or) cake decorating – is beneficial to us in a number of important ways.” She even included cake decorating! I was ecstatic to hear this because now there is almost proof, and a neuropsychologist believes, that crafting can be a stress reliever. That was the entire purpose of me picking cake decorating. It was to discover a stress reliever. I took a risk without being certain that cake decorating would help, but now I know it does, and I’m very exited to give purpose to my TED talk!!! I will now begin to rate myself on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being no stress and 10 being a lot of stress, to start a little experiment of my own with the effects of cake decorating to me. It may not prove much since it is only one person, but I like the idea of my experiment. Here’s the link to the article in case you are inclined to read it:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/25/health/brain-crafting-benefits/

The Grand Finale

          Surprise!! The finale is my decorations! My (slightly annoying) parents decided to accidentally forget to get me frosting. Of course I knew they were going to do that, so I looked up a concoction of my own. Making frosting really is not very hard. So here’s my recipe:

Ingredients-

·      1/2 cup solid vegetable shortening

·      1/2 cup (1 stick) butter or margarine softened

·      1 teaspoon clear vanilla extract

·      4 cups sifted confectioners' sugar (approximately 1 lb.)

·      2 tablespoons milk

Directions

1. In large bowl, beat shortening and butter with electric mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in vanilla.
2. Gradually add sugar, one cup at a time, beating well on medium speed. Scrape sides and bottom of bowl often. When all sugar has been mixed in, icing will appear dry.
3. Gradually add milk; beat at medium speed until light and fluffy.

          This recipe may be used throughout the rest of the project. I know it would be cool to make my own frosting every time but I also think that would take too much time. I might end up doing it though just to see how I can maybe adapt it to make it my own.

         

I first dropped the glob of frosting onto the cupcake as shown above. And then I tried to spread the frosting throughout the cake.

          Then terror struck. After starting the process of frosting my cupcakes, I came to a quick realization. I was unable to decorate the cupcakes like any of the videos where the cupcake was covered on the top and the sides too. Even by folding down the liners, the cupcakes were too small to cover the sides. It got all over my fingers, which was a sticky mess. In the end, when I continued to turn the cupcake, my fingers would just ruin the frosting on the sides.

Here are my first and last attempts to frosting the whole cupcake side-by-side

          You can see that I did improve in making it looks smoother, but the bottoms of the cupcakes are messy.

          As a result, I readjusted to frosting only the tops of the cupcakes but still using the technique of the crumb coat to make my cupcakes look as delectable as possible.

You can see that the cupcake naturally looks much cleaner even though it is just the crumb coat. I would like to note, that after the crumb coat and the cooling of the frosting in the fridge for about 10 minutes, there was a remarkable difference in the ease of the frosting (shown right)

Usually, before I knew about the crumb coat, I would just frost the cupcakes and they would never really look smooth or pretty. But I would only be doing the crumb coat, but now that I double coat the frosting, my skills have noticeably improved. I can't wait for the actual decorations of next week!!

Signing off,

The next Cake Boss

Comments:
Lizzy Cutler
Toni Mcfarland
Jacob Cohen