>I can’t even begin to compare myself to the Cake Boss. But I rocked a pretty decent sheet cake earlier this week for Bubba’s teacher.
She’s retiring this year…and she has been such a fantastic-I-can’t-say-enough-good-things-about-her teacher that I was so sad to hear she wouldn’t be teaching any more. Sad, and yet, happy for her. And thrilled that my boy had such an excellent, loving, and just plain awesome teacher this year.
So, as the room mom, I told her I wanted to do a special afternoon snack on Wednesday. And on Monday, I baked a couple of 9″x13″ cakes. One was dark chocolate, the other yellow.
I froze them once they were cooled–they get a better consistency and are easier to frost if you freeze them and then let them thaw. (I don’t know why, but I don’t question these things.) I pulled them out to thaw overnight before I went to bed on Tuesday.
Wednesday morning, I got together my stuff for decorating.
Once thawed, I set them on a cardboard cake tray. I put pieces of waxed paper under the edges so I could frost with abandon without messing up the cake tray.
First layer of frosting is very thin, aka the “crumb coat”. This totally takes care of any crumby-ness, and sets up a nice surface for the rest of the frosting. It also fills in any gaps between the two cakes.
I used Wilton decorator frosting, and it comes in an enourmous tub. While the crumb coat was setting up, I mixed up the colored frosting, using coloring gel rather than drops (you need an awful lot of the drops to get the right color, and the gels are more concentrated, so they don’t add a nasty flavor like the liquid can when used in quantity).
Using a thin metal spatula (there’s probably an actual name for it, but whatever…) I glopped a lot of white frosting on the now dried crumb coat and carefully spread it on the cake. I don’t know if it’s officially the right way to do it, but I did the sides first and then the top.
I smoothed the surface and the edges with the spatula. Then I was supposed to remove the waxed paper. I didn’t, until after I had done the writing…I needed to do a little touch up here and there on the sides where the frosting pulled away with the waxed paper, but that was easy enough to do neatly.
I put the colored frosting in disposable decorator bags with special tips that allow you to unscrew one tip and replace it with another, instead of doing up a new bag with a different tip.
I did the writing with #4 Wilton tips…after sketching out the layout on a piece of paper to make sure I got the spacing right. It didn’t come out quite perfectly, but hey, I’m just the supervisor, I’m not the Boss.
I finished up by piping a line of decorative frosting around the base of the cake, where it meets the cardboard, and then a scallopy sort of line around the top edge of the cake. Voila:
It’s no fondant creation, but not bad for an amateur using white frosting from tub.
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