Take the cake at your child's next party!
Mar 07 '00
So, you're not exactly Betty Crocker? There is no need to panic if your child requests a special cake at his or her next party. You don't have to be a pro at decorating or go out and buy a special character-shaped pan that you will never use again. I'd like to explain a simple method of decorating that will give your cake that special homemade touch but yet look presentable.
I made a cake in with this method for my daughter's Sesame Street party. I decided on an Elmo cake. I used a sheet cake pan instead of a regular 9 x 13. It had "crisper" edges, not the type of rounded look that the 9 x 13 pans sometime give. This pan will now be used over and over again for future cakes, not a dust-collecting Elmo pan stuck away in the basement. After frosting your cake with a smooth coat of your base color, these are the steps to follow:
1) Take an image of your chosen object, whether it be from a coloring book, a magazine or something you find on the computer. If the size isn't right, reduce or enlarge it on a copier. The simpler the picture, the better. You don't want to get too complex.
2) Lay waxed paper over the top of the image. Take a tube of decorating gel and trace the outlines. This is exceptionally easy if you use a coloring book picture, since the lines are nice and dark.
3) Carefully turn your image over onto your cake. You need to make sure you are laying it down where you want it on the finished cake, because once it is down, you don't get a second chance.
4) Press down gently on the lines, running your finger on them, until all lines have been pressed ever so gently onto the frosting. Lift up your paper.
5) You should now have your image on your cake. The rest is simply filling in the colors. You can make homemade frosting and color it, or just buy the pre-made tubes of decorating frosting in the store, depending on how much effort you want to put into it. Before you start filling in the colors, it is helpful to take black frosting and use a round tip to squeeze out a line of frosting that covers your gel lines. This gives it more of a "finished" edge on the image and shows clearly where your sections of color begin and end. It is desirable to cover up the gel, anyway, as it stays gooey and the line of gel on the cake isn't a crisp line, it's more of a flattened, smudged one.
6) You can fill in your color using any decorating method you'd like, usually by using a star tip and squeezing out stars closely together in rows to fill in color. If you have never done this before, buy a couple of frosting tubes ahead of time and practice on a test surface until you get the feel for it.
7) After the image is colored in, take complementary colors of frosting and make a "ribbon" of frosting on the top and bottom edges of the cake to finish it off. You can also add other little touches like individual stars scattered around the blank areas, like confetti, or write the child's name and age.
8) Take a picture! It's a cake you can be proud of. Homemade doesn't have to be a hassle!
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