Cake 101: Lesson 5: Frosting

It's Cake 101: Lesson 5: Frosting. I know the series is kind of jumping around a bit, but that's mostly because it's how things organize themselves in my mind as I go. That said, if there's something you'd like me to cover next/soon in the Cake 101 series, hit the comment button and let me know.

So, frosting.  There are probably 7 million frosting recipes out there and what I use depends on what I'm doing.

For a standard cake that I don't intend to do any decorating on (i.e. it's just cake and frosting) I generally use whatever frosting the recipe calls for. Cupcakes are mostly the same way -- some of the time I use this great frosting recipe from Hello, Cupcake! that involves marshmallow fluff. I've also used that as a base layer on a cake before and discovered that you shouldn't refrigerate it because it gets gummy.

For decorating cakes, I use the Wilton class recipe -- it's meringue powder, shortening (not butter, although you can do it with butter, the consistency is just a little different), water, powdered sugar, and flavoring.  This recipe is close -- use all shortening instead of butter, add 1 tablespoon meringue powder, and use water instead of milk.  The class butter cream recipe on the Wilton site doesn't match the one I have from the booklet for the course I took, so I'd recommend starting from the linked recipe.  You can add 3/4c cocoa powder to make a chocolate icing -- I recommend doing so if you intend to color the final product black as it gives a darker base to start from.

How much water you put in determines the consistency of the final product -- the base recipe gives stiff consistency. Add 1 tablespoon water per batch of icing to make medium consistency and 2 tablespoons to get to thin. Here's how I use the various consistencies.

• Stiff  - this is what you'd use to make the Wilton rose, and what I use for making some flowers.
• Medium - borders, drop flowers, some other flowers (pansies, sweet peas) piping (with piping gel added), stars, shells, etc. This is also what you would use if you were covering a cake in basket weave.
• Thin - this is the base icing for covering a cake. I also tend to use thin with piping gel for leaves.

Lastly we can't forget royal icing.  This is a stiffer consistency icing used to create various decorations. There's also a technique called color flow where you use a thinner royal icing to fill in shapes.  The advantage to royal icing is that the decorations made from it will keep for months.

You can of course, also use frosting from a can, but I find that the average can of frosting does not have a consistency that stands up to piping decorations. You can also buy pre-made icing and icing mix from Wilton, but I don't find it that hard to do, so don't spend the extra money to buy pre-made.

So that's the lowdown on the sweet stuff. Questions? Comments? The cake ninja is, as always, all ears.