cake toppers

Making Your Own Cake Topper

By David Urmann

If you have a thing about decorating cakes, whether you are experienced or novice, then you've got what it takes to design your own unique cake topper. If you love the design aspect of cake decorating more than the niceties and details of sugar craft and baking, then you will be passionate about putting together fruits or flowers or figurines and other pieces into stunning cake toppers.

The cake toppers embellish cakes that grace special occasions like birthdays, weddings, graduations, and anniversaries.
In creating cake toppers, it is important to cling to quality, exceptionality, and imaginative designs. The perfect cake topper mirrors the persona and style of the celebrator, and signifies the theme of the occasion.

You can begin your cake decorating venture with adornment background you bought from a novelty shop. For weddings, items like chapel windows can be added with groom and bride figurines, flowers plus other ornaments. To add charm, you can then put in little lights placed at the back of the stained glass window to reflect and highlight onto the statuette.
Gum paste and polymers are nice materials for figurine making of all sorts-grooms and brides, doves, hearts, etc. Figurines and decorations made of polymer clay will endure for so many decades.

For occasions where babies and young kids are the celebrator such as showers, christenings, and birthdays, you can stack petit fours. Bedeck petit fours to appear like cute building blocks. You can make use of tiny, charming things from a craft shop, too. A lovely pair of figurine doves can be placed in a birdbath coated with pearl droplet plus festooned with flowers and leaves.

You can also fashion a moving cheesecake or chocolate merry-go-round out of a gum paste. To make it move, take advantage of a rotary doll stand. Beautiful and various bouquets and flowers can also be created with gum paste molds. These molds are available in several sizes, patterns, and shapes.

Always exercise creativity. Say, a heaped, fanciful wedding cake can carry each layer, but for the top, frozen to look a lot like the palace's walls. Flowers and stairways can be toted up. And for the topper, employ royal icing as paste and place the towers you created on the top tier. Put in a pair of birds or hearts or other romantic emblem to the cake topper, and you'll have a cake topper signifying the groom and bride's bright future together.

In placing your cake topper, always remember to put bigger decorations on wide stands so they don't drop. Smaller ornaments can either be clutched in place using flower thorns or attached using royal icing. When stacking multi-layered cakes, it is best to set the topper at the venue already to prevent it from falling off in transit.

Prepare first the tier that will carry the cake topper. Use rods or dowels if the topper is quite heavy. If it is light, a decoration stand or plate will do.

Wilton Wedding Cakes

Wilton - American Dream

By Samantha Mitchell

If you decorate cakes or have ever shopped for cake making supplies, then chances are you are familiar with the Wilton brand. It's hard to miss their products since Wilton has led sales in baking and cake decorating products for over half a century. Based in the Chicago suburb of Woodridge, Illinois, Wilton has grown enormously from its beginnings as a family cake decorating business during the United States' Great Depression.

Today Wilton Industries sells over 2,000 different bake ware and food-related products, from instructional manuals and cake pans to pastry bags and food colorings. Wilton's products aren't just sold in the United States either. Major retailers in over 150 countries carry Wilton products. And business continues to grow with approximately 400 new consumer products being developed annually.

It all started in 1929 when Dewey McKinley Wilton, with the help of his wife, began a small cake decorating business in Chicago. Then came the stock market crash and the nation's Great Depression. Surrounded by high unemployment rates and bread lines, Wilton carved out a prosperous niche by creating wedding cakes for Chicago's famous hotels and clubs. The Wilton family business grew throughout the 1930's.
Decorating cakes for the rich and famous gave the Wiltons' reputation a nice boost. So when they opened a cake decorating and candy-making school for caterers and chefs, they had no problem with enrollment.

By 1947, the "Wilton Method" had become a household word among cake decorators, and a leading department store chain, JC Penney, was now promoting and selling Wilton products.
Before long the Wilton brand name become synonymous with cake decorating supplies and schools. All of this publicity laid the foundation for the Wilton's decorating empire that continues to influence wedding cake trends.

Then in 1977, under the leadership of Wilton CEO Vince Naccarato, three diverse companies were united as Wilton Industries: Wilton Enterprises, Copco and the Weston Gallery.
Today, each division is a recognized leader in its market. Wilton Enterprises is the number one preferred brand name in baking and cake decorating products, Copco is the premier designer and marketer of teakettles and quality kitchenware, and the Weston Gallery is a leader in upscale picture frame design and marketing.

Under the continued leadership of Naccarato, the company enjoys strong sales growth and national distribution, which are largely credited to "category management," that is basing marketing on tracked trends, and through "supply chain management," which helps retailers lower costs of merchandising.

According to Austin Chronicle report, the Wilton Method was the unquestionable ruler of cake decorating until the 1980's when Martha Stewart's methods gained popularity. Her made-from-scratch cakes and stance that taste is just as important as the decorating challenged Wilton's use of cake mixes and vegetable shortening.

However, Wilton continues to enjoy great success and to lead the industry. According to Hoover's November, 2006 business report, Wilton Industries employed 650 people and reported $325 million in sales for the 2005 fiscal year, a 7.8 percent increase from the previous year.
For three quarters of a century, Wilton has offered cake decorating classes throughout the United States and Canada, including the Wilton School of Cake Decorating in northern Illinois. Wilton is partially credited for bringing the intricate, European cake decorating method to the United States and Canada.

In fact, Wilton's cake decorating classes enroll nearly 200,000 students every year and from all around the world.
While many cake decorators enjoy the Wilton classroom experience, others like the customer below, prefer learning at their own pace at home with video instruction, such as the "Cake Decorating Made Easy" series.

Another ingredient in Wilton's recipe for success is its annual “Your Take on Cake” contest, which attracts thousands of talented cake decorators from across the United States and Canada who compete for $5,000 in cash and an all-expenses-paid trip to attend The Wilton School’s two-week Master Course for Cake Decorating in Darien, Illinois.

cake decoration

Cake Decorating –
Children's Birthday Cakes

By Shereen Oon

You will need only a few basic cake decorating tools to decorate cakes for birthdays and any special holidays. Elaborate tools are not necessary for making simple cakes. Cake decorating for children's birthday cakes will call for the following equipment:
-Rubber Spatulas which are made from a flexible material. You will use this for frosting bowls and scraping cake.
-Metal Spatulas that can come in two sizes, small and large, will be needed to smoothen and spread the cakes' frostings. Small spatula is used to apply thin layer of the cake's frosting. A layer of normal frosting will follow.
-Piping bags which are 18 inch, 12 inch and 8 inches and reusable, plastic disposable bags and Zip- locks can also be used in cake decorating
-Couplers or coupling nozzles will be needed in holding the bags into icing tips. It also enables you to change the tips whenever necessary.
-Food coloring paste, gel, or powder.

Important tips For cake decorating:
1. The ingredients that you will use must be at room temperature because they tend to blend better with that temperature.
2. An electric beater will be better than beating manually with a spatula as it will give lesser lumps in your cake.
3. Wire racks are needed for your cakes' inverting and cooling.
4. Trimming will make your cake sit flat. Make use of the side, which is smoother for decorating your cake.
5. Baking the cake a day before the decorating will lessen the crumbling. Remember also to set the cake in the freezer until the frosting part. However, if you decide to frost the cake you have to do it as soon as you put it out.
6. Cake boards are available at cake decorating shops or hobby shops, or you can also make one by covering cardboard in a colored foil.
7. Butter Cream is will make an excellent icing in cake decorating specially in birthday cakes for kids.
8. Unfrosted cake should have strips of waxed paper underneath. After the cake decorating, they are easily pulled out thus maintaining the neatness of your cake board.

The basic tools are a crucial part of successful cake decorating. Tips are suggested to aid you in your child's birthday cake. The labor will be hard but the result will be sweet. Numerous sites about cake decorating are available in the Internet to help you gather ideas. Some will already give you great cake decorating ideas from beginning to the end. Write all the tips that you think are useful and read from it when you encounter a problem in your cake decorating. If you cannot find a solution in your notes visit the web sites once again and look up for the answer. This will enable you to make beautifully decorated cakes in no time.

Wedding cake

Do-It-Yourself Wedding Cake Guide

By Jeanette Shinn

Recently I stopped in to visit a friend who runs a wedding cake supply store - a store that caters to pastry chefs, caterers, and hobbyists. During the course of the conversation she told me something that surprised me at the time, though in hindsight it shouldn't have: She said that this year she is being inundated with brides asking about how they might be able to bake the wedding cake themselves.

After all, said one, isn't it just flour, eggs, and sugar? Well, yes... and definitely not. A wedding cake is made up of those things, but on that level a Picasso is just oil and canvas. It is not the components that make up a masterpiece, it is the craftsmanship of the artisan.

That said, it is possible for a bridal party to create their own DIY wedding cakes 'in house', there by saving money, if they tread carefully and follow a few easy guidelines:

Use a Cake Mix: Surprised? Don't be. Not every scratch recipe can be doubled, tripled, or quadrupled and even a small wedding cake takes multiple recipes per layer. Cake mixes can be multiplied. The exception to this is the situation where the bride wants an eight inch cake on every table as the centerpiece and chooses to use something else as the wedding reception design focal point. Moreover, cake mixes survive because they have come upon a formula that makes the cake reliable - and the last few days before the wedding is not the time to discover something doesn't work.

Use Buttercream Icing: The pastry chefs that I know assure me that Buttercream is far easier to work with than any other form of icing out there.

Use a Cake Stand: Every other method of presentation requires something to be inserted through the bottom layers of the cake to provide stability. With a cake stand all one has to do is to place the wedding cake tier on the appropriate plate and slip it into place on the stand. Thus, no significant room for error.

Use Fresh Fruit, Flowers, Crystal Cake Jewelry, or? for Cake Decorations: Those hand sculpted sugar lilies on cousin Jen's wedding cake were gorgeous, but unless the budget allows the hiring of a craftsman the chances of getting enough that look good for a wedding cake are not good. Instead ice the cake smooth and then ask the florist to adorn the cake with flowers, or pile each of the layers with the fresh fruit of the season, or accent the cake with a display of items (clean of course) that represent the couple.

Take a Cake Decorating Class: More than one, if time allows. Taking the time to take a class through a local craft store, will do more than provide instruction on how to decorate a cake - though even learning the trick to smooth icing is worth the cost - it guides the individual in the purchase of the tools that they will need. This will save far more time and frustration than most imagine.

Of course, consider the option carefully before committing. Do-it-yourself wedding cakes might sound doable but remember, the cake has to be made in the last couple days before the wedding when there is little time for error or finding a bakery if things go wrong. Still, there is something quite personal and even a little bit romantic about a wedding that has been staged by the bride, groom and all of their loved ones. Whether it is a do-it-yourself Aunt making the wedding cake or a close friend the labor of love is intensely beautiful.