Cake Decorating with King Arthur Flour - Community Education Series

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and tonight we're here with a community education series, and we're with King Arthur Flour in their kitchens up at their plant, their main office. So I'm going to turn this over to King Arthur Flour and let them introduce themselves and tell you what we're going to do. All right, take it away.

I'm Alison Furbish and this is Susan Reed, and I'm just going to give you a brief introduction and then turn it over to Susan because she is going to show you what you're really here for, which is everything about cakes. But just a little bit of background. I have been an employee owner at King Arthur Flour for about 8 years and I manage blogger relations. So it has been my pleasure to coordinate this event with Susan and Chef Dennis Littley and our colleague Amy. This is our second Hangout on Air that we've done with Chef Dennis Littley, and we're really looking forward to this. And you probably are familiar with King Arthur Flour already, but I'm going to tell you just a couple things about us. So our company has been providing high-quality flours since 1790, and our hallmark has always been the high quality and the consistent baking performance. Our flours are unbleached, unbromated, and you can count on them to perform the same way every time you use them, which is great for bakers who want their baked goods to come out well. Our flour is available in supermarkets as well as online, and we also have a lot of great baking resources to help you when you're using our flour. So we have our blog, we have over 2,000 free recipes online, we have a hotline, a year-round hotline that you can call with your baking questions. We offer classes here in Norwich, Vermont, as well as on the road, and now online. We also have an email that you can sign up for, we're on Facebook and Google+ and Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, so you can connect with us in all of those places, and you can find us at KingArthurFlour.com to get to any of those other things. And so now I'm just going to turn it over to Susan, and Susan Reed is a baking and culinary expert, and she is the editor of our subscription newsletter, The Baking Sheet, and she's also the star of the cake DVD that inspired this Hangout. So I wish that you could smell the delicious smells in the kitchen right now, but Instead, I'll just let you watch Susan do her magic. So thank you for joining us tonight. And thank you, Susan.

Hey there. Our mission this evening is going to be assembling cake. Now you can use lots of different cake recipes. Allison is going to make sure that they're posted if you want to know what I'm using. These are all recipes that we have on our website. But what I want to show you is some of the techniques involved in putting together a layer cake that ends up the way you want it to look. So I have a couple of 2-inch cake layers here that I've baked before. And the absolute first thing to know is that these are cool. In fact, these are a little bit more than cool. I just took these out of the freezer. One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they're frosting a cake is they're trying to do everything all at once in a hurry, and they start putting frosting that's at room temperature on a warm cake, and all of a sudden the whole thing starts sliding everywhere and it just doesn't hold together. So it's really important that this is not warm. And it's preferable, really, if you can get it refrigerated to be chilled. Second thing you want to do is make sure that this cake is going to be flat. This cake is fairly flat, but it's got a little bit of a dome on it. You probably know that when you're going to frost a cake, you want to put the bottom side up because the bottom is perfectly flat. But if I flip this over right now as it is, these edges here would be shorter than this part in the middle. And if I flipped it over, the cake would want to crack, so it would not be a level playing surface, so to speak. So I'm going to turn it over after I trim a little bit off the top. So I've got a knife here. This guy is longer, it's serrated, and it's longer than the diameter of the cake. And that's kind of important because if you had a knife that was only this short, you'd have to make two passes and it's harder for it to work properly. So you want to keep the knife level, parallel to the surface of the cake, and you just want to let the knife do the work. Don't push it, just saw back and forth to make yourself a nice level surface. This makes the gre— the greatest scooter pie in the world. In a professional bakery, that top would be left on a tray to dry out, and then it would be ground up to make cake crumbs. And cake crumbs are often used to decorate the outsides of cakes. This is a chocolate cake, but I think it needs a little bit more interesting layers of flavor. So what I have here is simple syrup, that's equal amounts of sugar and water that's boiled together, and then I decided to make a little more interesting by adding a bunch of rum. So I'm just going to take this simple syrup and brush the top of the cake with it. This is going to keep it really nice and moist. And it's going to add some interesting flavor to it. Now I'm going to turn this upside down. This is an 8-inch round cake circle. I'm just going to do this. Flip it over. And when I bake this layer, I put a parchment circle in the bottom of the pan. So I'm going to peel that off. When you're peeling something off, things don't pull up this way because they're going to take more of your product with you. Peel in a parallel direction to the cake itself. I think a little bit more rum, be good flavor. So I'm going to give us a little brush here. And then I'm going to fill the cake. Later on, I'm going to show you a different technique where you pipe a dam around the outside edge.

Susan, I've never seen a brush like that. Does that fill itself and you just put that on?

Say that again.

The brush does that. Oh yeah, I've never seen that.

This is a silicone brush that acts like a squeeze bottle. And you sort of, you squeeze it and it sucks up the juice and then you can just paint the whole thing.

Wow.

I love this thing. You can go a lot faster than going back and forth and back and forth with a pastry brush. So it's a nice toy. Next, this is Italian buttercream. I find it to be the most stable. It's really versatile. You can flavor it. Thousands of different ways, and you're going to see a few examples of that. And it's made, in my case here, I usually use it, make it with meringue powder. So to fill the center, I am just going to put a healthy-sized blob right here and then smooth it out so it's level. I'm going to go onto the table because my Parchment is like there to keep me from making too big of a mess so that we can clean up if we have to. But this, I need this to stay put. So here we go. Now when you're setting up a cake, you really should frost it in two stages, which takes me back to the thing that I said about people trying to do this in a hurry. You really want to do a nice looking cake in two parts. You're going to fill it. I'm going to put the top of the cake on, the top layer. And then I'm going to do what's called a crumb coat. Now, a lot of you guys may know what that is, but if you don't know, this is the single best thing you can do technique-wise to get a better looking cake. So the filling is there. Now I'm going to trim this, same same. Snacks for the guy in the kitchen, or for crumbs later on. This guy's nice and full, just give him a little drink. You don't want to make it soggy, But you'll see it sink right in, and that's fine. I'm going to center this over the other cake, press it down so it's got good contact, peel that off. And now I'm going to do what's called a crumb coat. It's always a good idea to have two containers for frosting. You don't want to put your good frosting in this part of the, of the process because you're going to go back and forth and it's going to get all full of crumbs. So you want to take some of your frosting. I'm making an educated guess here. Then this should stay clean. It should either go in another container. If I need something else, I'll put it in something else. So all I want to do with this amount of frosting is seal the outside of the cake. So I'm going to fill in any gaps on the side. And I'm making sure that the frosting goes all the way down to the cardboard circle. Because if I don't, it's going to get dry. So I'm just taking some of this extra frosting that's on top. And you can see how thin this is, you can see right through it, and that's fine. That's just as it should be. So I'm going to go pretty much all the way around. I can scoop off any extra frosting if I need to. It's gonna be nice and sheer. And the sides of your cake aren't going to be perfectly straight because it's going to shrink away from the pan as it cools a little bit, no matter what you do. So this coat really is meant to give you good straight sides and to make sure that no crumbs come back up in the frosting when you go for your final coat. So that's pretty much where I want it to go. And then take off any extra off the top. And it's okay that it looks like it's got freckles because you're never going to see that. This is like a foundation coat. If you've ever done any sheetrock work, spackling, This is that first pass, which is not how it's going to look when you're done. Now the next step, and this is where it takes a little extra time. This needs to go in the refrigerator and it needs to chill for at least half an hour. You want this to set up so that it's firm. So Allison, this is where you got to give me a hand.

Cool. I promise I won't do anything with this.

She's gonna tuck that under her arm and make a run for the parking lot right now because it's made of chocolate. And I know this woman. This cake is crumb coated and what you want— it's been in— this also has been in the freezer. I took it out a while ago. You don't want to freeze it solid because if you try to frost over that, it's going to sweat. The moisture from your room temperature frosting is going to create condensation.

That's not good.

But you do want this to be set enough so if you touch it, like I'm just touching it here, that is not coming up on my hand. So this is firm, it's smooth. These crumbs are not going to go anywhere. And I'll tell you a little secret that I didn't do on that cake. On this cake, I piped the dam around the edge, chilled it, and then I don't know if you can see that. But I happen to have some caramel sauce around, and I personally think that chocolate and caramel are two of the greatest foods in the world next to each other. So I drizzled a bunch of caramel sauce on it before I put the top layer on. So now what I'm going to do with this is what's called the finish coat. So I'm going to take some more of this frosting, and I'm going to make a nice outside to it. And it's going to be so much easier because I've got a firm, stable foundation to work with. So usually what you want to do is put a little more frosting than you think you need because you can always take it back up and get the top smooth. I'm having a great time with caramel today. See, now this is why you need two separate containers because I got A rogue cake crumb. Get rid of that guy. I do have a cake turntable here. I'm going to be using it in a minute. But for this cake, I'm just going to stay on the tabletop. Not going to worry too much about that for right now. This is an offset spatula, which if you're trying to frost a cake with a straight spatula unless you're trying to get a smooth top on a really big cake. That's the only time I ever use those. But I use offsets constantly. I think that they are a really important weapon to have in your arsenal. They're not very expensive and they're just much easier to work with. So buttercream will show every track that you make in it. So that's where cake turntables come in very handy. But what I'm trying to do is get a nice opaque layer on the outside, cover up the caramel so it will stay a surprise when you slice. There we go. Now there's a couple of things you can do to make the sides of your cake. You can drive yourself crazy making it perfectly smooth. That's— a turntable will help you do that. You can give it some texture on purpose. There are lots of easy ways to do that. You can use a cake comb. Which I may just do on this because I think it'll show up better than on the chocolate. I'm gonna switch to a bigger spatula and show you how to make a nice smooth top on your cake. This guy's a little bit longer. All of these little lumps that are up here, if you want to take them off, take your spatula at a 45-degree angle. And just sweep towards yourself. And that's how you get a nice professional looking edge all the way around your cake. Now we're going to decorate this as well. Too much. I took too much. Mistakes are good to make in front of people because you will learn much more from fixing that mistake. Than if everything was perfect every single time. I find that when I'm teaching, people tend to give themselves a hard time if they don't do it right the first time, but that's what learning is about. Figure it out.

Mistakes.

So I'm trying to work toward you guys, so it's hard for me to see what I've actually done. Um. Without the turntable. Okay. I think I will comb the sides of this cake. Find it. But for that I'm gonna need the turntable, and for that things are gonna get tall for a minute here. Now, if your work surface is this tall, You're not going to want to put a turntable on that, make cake on top of that, because that's very hard to work with. So if you can't make the table lower, make yourself taller. This is what I'm about to do.

We good?

Okay. So what I'm going to do with this is This is— if you've ever worked on a potter's wheel, it's the same idea. You, you want to make sure your cake is centered so it doesn't wobble. You know, the part where you lean on it. And I'm just going to take this comb and I'm just going to place it in one spot and very lightly let it draw lines all the way around the cake. Cool. Just like the bakery. Now you might have to go around a couple times to even things out. And you want to try not to press down with the comb, you're just gonna pull it across. And it makes your cake look very professional with very little effort. But I think we should do more stuff to this. Since we know that this has got some caramel in it, I want to pipe some decorations on the top of it. That involve some caramel buttercream that I also made. So I want to show you a few things that make your life much easier when you're working with pastry bag. This is one of those things that a lot of people think that they can't do, but pastry bags make a huge difference when you're working with them. One of the first things that you want to do— we use a lot of these disposable pastry bags here because we do a lot of a lot of cakes. I've taken this bag, I've folded over the top, and I've put a small star tip into the end of it. The hardest thing about filling a pastry bag is you really need 3 hands to do it. You need a hand to hold this, something to put it in, and some way to keep things from getting messy. So I will use very often a tall, narrow container, a beer glass, or, you know, heavy— this is a heavy pint glass— is a good way to go. Just something to hang on to the bag for you so that your hands are free to focus on what they're doing, because you need one hand to hold the container of frosting and another to put the frosting into the bag. This is some Italian buttercream that I mixed some homemade caramel into. So it's tasty stuff. And it's going to be, you can see it's a slightly darker color. I hope you can see. This is kind of beige from the carnival. So now that I've got this, I got it all secure over there. The idea is not to get frosting all over the part of the pastry bag that you're going to be hanging on to, if you can possibly avoid it. So I'm just going to do this. Let gravity do part of the work. Now the cleaner you keep the top of this bag, the better off you're going to be, and there are a couple of ways to do that.

Hopefully, I have it here.

You can use a dough scraper once you have the frosting in the bag and you can push it down with your hands down toward the tip. Take a dough scraper and just push the frosting down so it's not going to want to back up on your hands like that. Another tool that I use constantly, and I don't know how anyone bakes without them anymore, is found at the office supply store. These are metal spring binder clips. So before I start working with this frosting, I'm going to fold the bag over. I'm going to take this clip and I'm just going to let it keep the bag closed for me. So that when I squeeze this, it's not gonna back up, go over my hand, and go everywhere. You can use a twist tie. This is just a little bit easier to get in and out of. When you're garnishing or finishing cake, you always want to put decorations on top that reflect the flavors that are inside the cake. So since I know that I have caramel inside this cake, I'm gonna put a little caramel frosting on the top. So these edges, which are not particularly perfect, I'm not going to worry about that too much because I'm just going to draw some rosettes on the top. Now if I did have a bunch of cake crumbs from the top, I could decorate the bottom of the cake with that, but I think we'll just play with caramel. Rosettes are one of the easiest things that you can do. Just squeeze and then release the pressure as you finish. It's always a good idea to tie the bottom of your cake to whatever it's sitting on. This is on a 10-inch circle. Now, at this point, I would take my big spatula— forgot to get one of these— and move it to a serving plate. So I would just pick this up, put it on whatever plate I was going to serve it on. And then once it was sitting on that plate, I would bring my pastry bag back out and I would pipe the bottom so that the cake is literally tied to the plate so you don't see that cardboard circle. Trying to do it so you can see. Sure.

There was a question from somebody who's watching about whether we use butter or do we use shortening in the frosting.

This frosting that we just had a question about, butter or shortening, this is a butter frosting. I like the flavor of that better. I will very often, depending if I'm making a wedding cake in the summer where I know this is going to be sitting on a table where where it's 80 degrees. I will often combine the two, 'cause shortening has a higher melting point and you can get good definition. This one is made with 80% butter and 10 to, well, around, actually 85/15. So there's a little shortening in here, 'cause I knew I was gonna be piping in a warm environment. And the shortening will help to stabilize it a little bit, but the flavor is, The first thing you're gonna get is butter. And it's very silky, and as you can see, it really holds a nice shape. So this is, this cake is going to be sought after, I think. I'm gonna have to hide it from myself 'cause I do like the caramel.

And somebody asked what size tip is that? Do you know right off the top of your head?

Until I take this out of the bag and see, I think it's about a 5, It's small. It's— I like smaller star tips for this. Maybe if I— if you see from right there, can you see that? Zoom in. Just so you know, a 7 is like a good size star tip. This is either a 4 or 5. And this is what's called a closed star tip. You can see how the points are pointing down toward the middle of the thing. It's not straight. So that gives you pretty sharp definition also. Those are just a few things about that. But those are good questions, so keep them coming. If there's anything else you want to know, let me know and I'll tell you what's in my head. So I'm going to do another cake. This one is going to be a vanilla cake. And, um, let's take this guy out of here.

Yep.

Amy's going to take that one under her arm and run. And hey, Alison, can you hand me that layer right there? Yeah. Okay, we have here a yellow cake layer. This one actually came out of the oven quite flat. I don't need to trim this, so I've already flipped it over and put it on a cake board. Now I'm just going to Peel that. And on this one, I am going to do what's called piping a dam. I don't know if you've ever seen cakes that when you, you have your layer cake going on, you got two layers, and then you look around the side and it looks like this bulge, like the muffin top bulge. And that's because somebody skipped a step. They put on the middle part of the frosting and they didn't chill it so it would set up, because when then you put the weight of the top one up layer on top, it all sort of squishes out the side. So when you look at the side of the cake, it's not straight. It goes, "Bloop, bloop." So what I'm going to show you now is a way to keep that from happening. So on this yellow cake layer, I'm going to just pipe a nice little round Simple enough. Now this, this frosting is our super simple chocolate frosting. It's not a buttercream. It's much more chocolatey than that. But it is relatively soft. What I'm going to do now is put this in the refrigerator and this needs to get nice and firm. Once that happens, the world is your oyster. Now you can do this for a white cake. Say this was a white cake for a wedding. And I wanted to fill it with some raspberry jam and lemon curd. I couldn't just put those things on there and put another layer on, or else it would all seep right out the side. If I did this with the white frosting, let that firm up, and then put those juicier things inside, they would stay where I put them. So that's the point of this exercise. So now we're gonna being the good doobie that I am, I have already done this earlier.

More cake for later.

More cake! Now that's, this is the same frosting, same idea, and as you can see, bump bump bump bump bump, this is nice and firm. So now I can put some good stuff in it. So in my diabolical food brain, I decided that I needed to see if it was possible to make peanut butter buttercream. And it is. So this is about equal parts smooth peanut butter and Italian buttercream. But this is kind of juicy. And if I just put this in the middle of the cake and squished another layer on top, it was— it would come right out the sides. So I'm trying not to go any higher than the dam that I built. And because when it comes to cake, more is always better. One of the things that King Arthur has in its food arsenal are these little baby peanut butter cups.

Yes.

So I'm going to embed peanut butter cups inside the cake. I think it's really fun when you make a cake, when you slice it open, if there's a little surprise. Kellsupplies. So I'm just going to bury the treasure a little bit right there.

Yum.

There we go. And then later on when we finish this, we can of course put more of these bad boys on the top. So that'd be good. Another layer. Amy's got this one. Lately I have been making— since there's, let's be honest, there's only so much cake anybody should eat at one given time— I've been making a lot of 8-inch cakes because that way you don't have to live with cake for a week. You can always refreeze cake. Like, if you cut a wedge out of this, you could take some of your frosting and seal those cut edges and put it in the freezer, and it would stay pretty fresh. I don't really understand why anyone would do that, but apparently it does happen. So what I'm going to do now is use more of our happy Super Simple Chocolate Frosting. And suppose you don't have any of these fancy toys like the offset spatula or anything else. This is just a little— this is like a peanut butter spreader. So you could probably do pretty much what I'm about to do with a kitchen knife. This is— Allison's right, it's a pity you can't smell this because we could do facials with this. It's so good. It's so nice.

Somebody has asked for the link for this peanut butter frosting.

Yeah, you make the Italian buttercream, you take, you measure out 1 cup of the buttercream, and you put in like 3/4 of a cup of peanut butter and just mix it until it's done.

Easy.

Easy. Buttercream is very forgiving stuff. If you've got the Italian stuff, is really good. It will accept lots of different flavors. It occurs to me, since I happen to have caramel buttercream, if I put some of that on here, I've almost made a Snickers cake. You could put crunched up peanuts on the top too, which would be nice, or peanut brittle, depending on what you want for texture. So this is a soft frosting, but we're going to make that work in our favor. So remember I said there were some easy things that you could do to make the sides of your cake look good? Going up. Actually, wait a minute, because how is this?

Can you—

I'm gonna work from here. This will work. I don't have to climb. So I'm gonna take some of the frosting on this. Let's see if I can do this where you can see it. I'm just gonna take this and work up and down. You can just do ribs. Since this is soft, this guy is gonna be kind of punked out. This guy isn't chilled, but he's not warm either. Ideally, that two-step process of putting a thinner layer on top and then coming back and doing this, that holds true for this frosting as well. It's a good idea almost with any frosting that you use. I'm not doing anything too terribly sophisticated. I'm just frosting this with an up and down motion and letting those tracks show up. That's fine. I mean, you're gonna eat it, doesn't have to be a museum piece. But what we can do after we get this looking consistent is gussy it up in other ways. I have a little bit of an arsenal of pastry bags with colors and flavors and stuff. So, and I think they'll show up nicely on the chocolate. One of the worst things you can do when you're dealing with something like this is to overwork it. You don't want to make yourself insane. I'm just gonna clean this off and do what I can do. On the top. Smooth a little bit.

Quick question while you do that.

Sure.

Um, somebody's asking about uneven cake layers. It sounds like they have a problem where the cake will kind of slant. Do you have any suggestions for how to manage that?

Slanting cake layers. There are, I can think of like 4 different ways that could happen. One way is if your oven rack is sitting up higher on one side than the other and you just haven't noticed. It's, it happens. Another way is your oven has got 2 heating elements and one of them has gone and is out and you don't know it. So that one side of your oven is hotter than the other side. So if you don't have an oven thermometer, it's a good idea to check. If you know that happens to your cakes, I would say try spinning them 180 degrees halfway through the bake, or which I generally don't like to do because every time you open the oven door, your oven temperature drops, and then it has to fight to get back up to temperature, and that could create more problems than it solves. So not surprisingly, and this happened to me when our kitchen was getting remodeled, the first time the guy installed the oven, he didn't have the box that the oven was in level. So before you get too far into it, get yourself a level and see what— if it's level inside your oven, because the most likely thing is that the inside of the oven is not level. And then what do you do? Well, maybe you go get one of my metal spring clips and fuss with it until you get a level a level layer or a level shelf. So I feel your pain. There's nothing about that that's fun. So I have here— let's see, this is— what are our flavors? Did we embed peanut butter in this? Okay, so we should put some peanut butter fun on the top. And maybe what we'll do is make a little garden of peanut butter. I like using— this is a leaf tip. It's a small one. So we're gonna put a few little garden spots here. I have this on the bag with a coupler. I could unscrew this if I wanted to and switch out to like a number 1 brown tip and then draw vines on this cake if I wanted to. See how ambitious we get before the evening is over. And I have a couple of flowers and I'm thinking maybe what can happen is that the peanut butter cups can be the center of the flowers. Why not? It's nice on a chocolate cake just to do a little bit of color. It's springtime. You wouldn't know it from being in Vermont, but that's the rumor. I'm just gonna bring the camera. Let's see how— look at this, little peanut butter cup daisies. Cool. I'm just gonna take this and I'm gonna stick it Right in the middle.

Mwah!

They look like rhodbeckia or echinacea, depending on what's in your garden. This guy doesn't have enough frosting, so I have to juice him up and then put that guy there. So if you've got somebody that you're making a special occasion cake for that is a peanut butter hound, this is a fun thing to do. Should be a fun cake. I might switch out to do— it's really pretty.

You have some healthy stuff on there.

Cool. I just made this up.

Cake happens. Somebody asked, Susan, do you ever use the method of a hot knife dipped in hot water to smooth the frosting?

You have a knife smooth in hot water to smooth frosting. When I'm doing wedding cakes where I'm going to do like a Swiss dot or an overlay or something that's really kind of complicated, I have done that. The trick— you don't want to get hypnotized because you can literally spin this thing around thousands of times trying to get every last little bubble and wick and crease out of it. Knowing when to stop is one of the hardest things to do when you're finishing a cake. And you almost always know if you're— if you're wondering if you should do more, the answer is no. Hopefully you get to that point where you ask yourself that question. And we're lucky here in the test kitchen because I can always look up and say to one of my colleagues, like, okay, I like what I've got so far. And I'm thinking maybe, and they'll always say, no, you're done. So just kind of know when you're done. That can be hard. This is probably, if this wasn't so terribly green, I could pipe a base with this, but I think I will go to the caramel instead, which is actually going to look quite nice. And instead of doing a shell, I'm just going to pipe little stars because that will be similar to what's going on on the top with the flowers. Are you hungry yet?

That is the question.

Mmm, cake. Some demonstrations I do on the road and I have people coming up with their wallets open saying, "How much do you want for that?" Usually it's about apple pie. I'm buying that pie. So you saw what it looked like a minute ago before I had done anything to the base of it. And now you can see it's a little tiny thing, but it makes such a difference in just the quality of the presentation that you have when you're done. So I think that is most of what I've got, unless you guys have more questions. I'm happy to answer anything that you've got. If you'd like me to show you something else, I can try to do that too. So, what do you think?

Well, I want to just say one thing quickly.

Mm-hmm.

I forgot at the very beginning to say that if you leave us a comment, you will be entered in the drawing for a free DVD, which is 2 hours of Susan telling you about all things Kate. So leave us a comment. It can just be a comment, it can be your question, and we'll choose a winner for that DVD.

Cool.

Um, delux. And then we do have a question from somebody jumping ahead to the cleanup process.

Yes.

They want to know what you think the best way is to clean up the tips and bags after you're done with them.

Ah, that is actually a really good question, cleaning up all that stuff. Um, I will usually, when I go to deconstruct this, um, I'll take off the coupler I will literally take a pair of scissors and cut this whole business off, and I will usually put everything in hot soapy water, and once I know that everything is out, I'll run hot water through the tip, some— and I will take a side towel if it needs it and wipe it out. But the other thing that you want to do is make absolutely sure that the tips are dry before you put them away, or else they're going to corrode, and that's not good. So if you really got a good-sized project going on, we have a lot of stuff going on, it doesn't hurt to put them on a baking sheet and put them in like a 200-degree oven for 5 or 10 minutes just to totally dry them out, and then you can put them away and store them. But that is a really good question. You know, with all the butter that's in this frosting, it can be a bit of a mess, and really all you can do is just use plenty of hot soapy water, and that's your best bet. And make sure they're dry. Anything else? Dennis, how about you?

I am just amazed. I'm watching in awe and drooling.

Did I make you hungry?

Oh my God, I think I was— didn't you see me shaking my head when you said, "Are you hungry?" That is just amazing. Now I have a question about Italian buttercream. I've never made one. How hard is it to make?

People get a little intimidated by it because you have to boil a sugar syrup. So to make an Italian buttercream, first you make a meringue. So you can use either egg whites, or just for food safety reasons, and just because I don't know what to do with all those extra yolks, I use a mixture of meringue powder and water. So you whip up the egg whites. You can use powdered egg whites too, that's fine. Whip up the egg whites with a little bit of sugar, not much. Much. And then as that's happening, you've got some sugar on the stove boiling. You need to put sugar in a pan with a little bit of water. It comes to a boil, the water cooks off, and you cook it to about 248 degrees. It's always good if you have a little nonstick pan when you do this. So there are a couple tricky parts. I did a pretty extensive blog about this on our website, so you can see all these pieces, parts. But you pour that into the meringue, and then you have this bowl bowl of hot sugary egg whites. That has to come down in temperature, and then you add soft butter to that mixture. And every Italian buttercream I've ever seen, except for the ones that I was trying to break for the blog and couldn't, goes through a really awful curled-looking stage, and almost everybody who tries it thinks that they've screwed it up. And they end up throwing it out. If you just let the mixer keep going, it will come back together around— all of a sudden you'll see this spot in the middle that starts to look like thick and creamy and perfect inside this little ring of curdled stuff. You just have to have a little bit of faith that this is going to happen. If you're really panicky and it looks really curdled, one way that you can save it is to throw in a few tablespoons of Crisco. Because then you'll— that will often save your emulsion if you're having a hard time establishing one. And from there on out, it's whatever you want to flavor it with. You can add, you know, vanilla's pretty basic. You don't want to put a lot, but you can. I will often, if I'm doing a wedding cake, I'll take off what I need for the outside of the cake, and then with the last third of what's in the bowl, I will just like add fresh raspberries right to the bottom. Cream and use that for the filling, and it is really tasty. It's one of the nicest things. You don't want to tint it with raspberry jam, doesn't work. Just throw in some fresh ones and you really like what you get.

How does that hold up? Does the liquid affect it at all from the raspberries?

Does what? Sorry.

Does the liquid from the raspberries affect the consistency of it?

The— an established Italian buttercream is a little more durable than a Swiss one, which is one of the reasons I like it. I've put like 2, I've put an entire pint of raspberries into a quart of buttercream and it's fine. But no, it doesn't seep or weep, but you don't want to spread the outside of the cake with that because it's gonna have the seeds and everything like that. But for filling, it's great. No, it works.

Good.

We have a question here from Tree Lindsay. And she says, regarding ganache, I made a cake with chocolate ganache for Easter, and you're supposed to spread it while it's still warm to keep from getting thick and hard. However, her top layer started to slide on the warm icing and then harden, and she couldn't get it centered again.

Oh, hmm. Partly depends on the ganache. I mean, you can have a ganache that is firm, medium, or soft. And if it, I don't know if it's a whipped ganache or if it's a poured ganache. Usually if you're gonna make a whipped ganache, you would make a soft one, which means it has more cream in it, higher ratio of cream to chocolate. And then you can whip that and spread it like whipped cream. But it sounds like if the thing was setting up on her, It was probably a firm ganache. So you can actually, um, if you're worried about that happening again, you could put a skewer in those layers while you poured so that everything stayed where you put it as you're pouring the ganache over it. And before the ganache settles down, you can pull them. That's what I would do for what I would call the belt and suspenders version, just to make absolutely sure things stay put.

Okay, absolutely. Someone asked if you could demonstrate how to put the tip on a pastry bag when using a coupler.

When using a coupler? Um, let's see, I would have to go get a coupler, but I can totally get you started. This is a disposable pastry bag, and if you're brave enough— I looked all over for couplers, I'm trying to think of where I put them. Anyway, what you want to do— let's pretend this is the inside of the coupler— is take a look at this and first you're just going to cut something off that is— you want it to be about as wide as the base. And to get these things to open up, just do that. When you do this— now if this was a coupler, you would put the coupler inside and then There's a threaded base right here. I don't know if you can see that. Yeah, it's gonna be a long shot. So this is the base that I put inside the bag here, and then I put the tip right on here, and then you just put this over the tip and screw it into place. So the nice thing about this is you can change what you're working with. So if I decided I wanted to put vines on that cake the way that I was threatening to do, we take that off, do that. And this is a different tip. This is a number 1 that sits right over there. Now, as long as you're working with the same color, nothing to worry about. So now I can draw little vines or little leaves. Next to here, little tendrils, link one. So that's one of the nice things. If you— if I wanted to write on this cake for happy birthday, I could switch any message that you want to send, easy enough to do. So I hope that gives you the idea, I hope it's helpful.

Great. Someone also asked, you had mentioned about freezing a cake, frosting it, put it in the freezer.

Yep.

Would that work like, I mean, if you just want to save half a cake, could you do the same thing, cut it in half?

Yep, you could cut it in half, take some of your frosting, and just seal up the cut edge, pop it in the freezer. I don't put cakes in the freezer naked, I put them in some sort of carrier. Lately, the dollar stores that I've been at have been carrying perfectly adequate shell plastic things to just store it so that it won't pick up flavors. Anything else in your freezer. Butter tends to absorb flavors, so you gotta be careful that it's in a secure environment.

Speaking of butter, you always use unsalted?

I do, and I do put a little bit of salt in my meringue because I just find that the flavor is so much brighter. It's such a little amount, it's like an eighth of a teaspoon, but I really notice the difference if it's not in there.

Okay. Do you use whipped cream at all for your cakes?

I think, I think that frozen whipped cream is one of the greatest creations in the universe. I grew up eating ice cream cakes that had frozen whipped cream on. I always thought that was like the greatest thing. I will often stabilize it, and there are a lot of ways to do that. You can do a mixture of sugar and a little bit of modified food starch, something like Instant Clear Gel that we sell. One thing that I've used to stabilize whipped cream that I really like is coconut milk powder. If you like coconut flavored whipped cream, it's really nice stuff.

Okay, someone asked if you could go over the different tools that you use to— while you were decorating.

The different tools that I have in my arsenal here are— I had an offset spatula, pastry tips, a really good long serrated knife for trimming the top of things. Gotta have a pair of scissors in the house. Disposable pastry bags, can't live without them. This is called a dough scraper, it's just— or a bowl scraper, you can just use it to scrape things or to do that. I have I used a cake comb. You can find these in either plastic or metal, and they have 3 different gauges. These are wider teeth, these are tiny teeth, these are kind of in between. And this one has wide teeth for the bottom of your cake and skinny teeth for the top. That's kind of neat. And I also used a small offset spatula. You always want to have a couple of bowls around. Want to have— oh, and we don't sell this anymore, but a pastry brush. This one happens to be a squeezy kind of one, so it will hold up juice, which I really like to use. But, and of course, a good heavy-bottom, tall, narrow glass. A vase can work if you need to, but that will just help you get yourself set up. And My buddy, the spring metal clip for holding the bag closed. I think that's it.

Very good. And definitely that Lazy Susan there, you have the cake turntable. Cake turntable.

And you could use a Lazy Susan, yeah, there's no reason you couldn't. Cake circles too are important.

You guys sent me some of those parchment circles and I thought I died and went to heaven because I didn't have to cut them.

Yeah, huge. We have them in 8 and 9-inch sizes.

Yeah, those were great. Now how important is it to use a cake circle when you're frosting? And I noticed you did that all the time. You put a cardboard cake circle under it. Yeah, is that just so you can lift it up easier later, or it helps you move the thing around?

That's That's part of it. Very often when I'm making a cake, I'm giving it away to somebody. So if you were going to go to a bakery and get a cake, that's how they would do it. So they would put the cake in a box and give it away. The other problem— I mean, if you're just serving a cake at home, you can totally just put it on a plate. But you'd be amazed how hard it is to find a cake plate that's flat, because big plates that can fit a cake are almost always indented, and then it gets really hard to frost around them. So that's one of the reasons why the circles are— they won't let you down. They're the right size. It's kind of like the parchment circles, you know, they just do what they're supposed to do. And they're not hard to find. Almost every— any place that has any kind of cake supplies will have cake circles.

Okay. And we just had a question about your simple syrup. You can pretty much add anything you want into that liquid-wise, other alcohols or—

Yeah, you can do any kind of liqueur. I've done simple syrup that has passion fruit nectar in it. I've done simple syrup that has citrus in it. Vanilla is good. Any flavor extract that you like, you can put in there and it'll work. It's very versatile stuff.

Is there any rule of thumb on ratios for that, on how much to add?

Well, you can— it's like any sugar syrup, usually it's half and half. So if you had a cup of water and a cup of sugar, that would be a light simple syrup. If you want something that's a little bit more viscous, you would use a little bit less water, but generally it's 1 to 1.

But then in adding your liqueur, does that matter after that, or just—

Well, you don't want it to be smelling like the back of a bar, but usually a couple tablespoons is about right.

Okay, great. And does that hold up? You can refrigerate— would you refrigerate it or leave it out?

You should refrigerate it, actually, because, I mean, it'll hold up for a day or two, but after that, I haven't— I have seen it get moldy. So in the fridge, it's pretty much indefinite.

Okay, great. Okay, Michelle Palin wants to know— she asked about the cake circles, also the cardboard. Is there a time you would take it off to put it on your plate to serve it?

No, because actually once you put the layer down on there, if you tried to take it off there, you would just tear up the whole bottom of the cake. So I just slice right down to the cardboard and nobody's ever— I mean, it's food-grade stuff, there's nothing that's dangerous or harmful about it.

So I guess unless we're taking pictures of it and we need to see We don't want to see the cardboard, that would be the only—

Then you have to find a plate that is just as flat as the top of this thing, which means some very dedicated shopping because we have hundreds of plates here, we have maybe 3 that are flat.

I can get that one.

Alright.

Yeah.

Well, that's about all the questions we have right now. I don't know if anyone else has any last ones.— we'll be happy to address them. But boy, that was really informative, and I learned a lot watching that DVD too. Only it gave me a little bit of false sense of security because I said, "Oh, I can do that now, I can do that now," and my cake came out better than it ever had, but it wasn't yours.

I've done a lot of cake. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but what didn't show up on the Cake DVD blooper reel was the complete somersault at the top of that wedding cake took.

Oh no.

See, well, the fact that you didn't know that is a good thing.

Yes, very good thing.

Yes.

Well, Susan, thank you so much for your time. You really did a great job showing us how to decorate and give us some courage to try these. I know with me, I would have never picked up a pastry bag, and you got me to do that. I like the idea of that dam, that's a really nice thing because I think filling, using some different fillings, especially with Cake Bloggers because we get crazy and we'll be stuffing that with all kinds of things.

Well, really the world is your oyster, you have so many choices, it's only whatever flavors you can put together in your head you can make happen on this plate, it's just a question of having the thought and then having a little patience, don't back yourself into a corner. Corner. That's what so many people just try to do everything all at once for the first time, 5 minutes before they need it. Practice. Back your time up a little bit, and you're going to give yourself the space to learn, and you'll have a much better experience.

You know, we didn't mention this, but I know on the DVD it said that it was really important for all the ingredients to be at room temperature.

Mm-hmm. Why? Well, the structure of a cake involves putting air— you want to make a matrix of little air bubbles in butter. So the harder the butter is, the less effective that's going to be. A lot of things about cakes are emulsions. So you have fat and water trying to get away from each other, and if you have extreme temperatures, if one is really cold and the other one isn't, that emulsion is gonna break and the texture of your cake is not gonna be as good. For the buttercream, you need that meringue to be at room temperature before you add soft butter, or else you're gonna have a big soupy mess, because if you put warm butter into warm meringue, it's just all gonna melt. So those temperatures are important. If you put really cold milk from the refrigerator into your cake batter, that's gonna curdle curdle everything too. Wow.

I know a lot of those what happens if you do it wrong things on your video, I'm going, ah, that's what happened to that. It was like a picture of most of my cakes for a while.

All like— And creaming is one of those things too. People tend to think that creaming is something that you can do for 15 minutes, and that's not true. We get a lot of stuff, we get a lot of questions where the cakes collapse, and that's because they put their mixer on high speed and then like went and did the laundry and came back. And I do a very specific shot of overcreaming in that DVD just because people don't know what that looks like. So we wanted to demonstrate how that looks.

Okay, and a question on flours. You know, I have a box of cake flour, but I mean, I usually buy all-purpose flour. How do you know when to use which one? Is it just specific to the recipe, or can they be swapped out?

Um, for most cakes, they can probably be swapped out. If you're going to do what's called a high ratio cake, like a really dense white cake, like you would make a wedding cake, um, cake flours are designed to be able to keep together more fat and more sugar, which sounds awful but tastes great. So all-purpose flour will do the same, but it won't be quite as tender. So that's what a cake— this called high ratio— has a high proportion of sugar and butter to the amount of flour that's in the cake. And softer flours are able to stabilize that better than something that's an all-purpose flour.

So I could pretty much just swap it out, the cake flour, and if I'm making a cake and it calls for flour, just—

yeah, as long as you're measuring correctly by weight.

Weight.

You probably can.

Okay, yeah, weight, I understand. I actually got my scale out for everything, too.

That's nice.

I look at it sometimes and wave to it, but I hadn't used it, so I got it out and used it. Now, God forbid anyone would want to, but why would you— to make a cake healthy, can we use whole grains?

Yes, actually you can. We did a whole grain baking book here, and I made the cake that's on the COVID using whole wheat pastry flour. Actually, there are some cakes that are really well suited to whole grains. Cakes that are like banana cake or carrot cake, you would never know. You would never know that it's whole grain. It tastes just as good. Usually anything that has strong flavors— excuse me. Chocolate cake is good with whole grains, and so pumpkin, anything with a fruit or vegetable puree is really good with whole grains. You could serve it to people and they wouldn't have the first idea about it. Tell them after they eat. Don't tell them before.

It's not something for a delicate cake, like you wouldn't make a wedding cake out of it, but, uh, you could.

If they were hippie enough, I would. Well, that's good. Depends on the bride.

Depends on the bride. Okay. All right, yeah, because I know I have a lot of friends that are healthy cookers and they're gonna wanna know about using whole grains. Now, is there a difference? I mean, that's gotta weigh more, doesn't it? Is there a specific change for the recipe then, right? You couldn't just swap those out.

Let's see, if you're using whole grain pastry flour, it weighs a little bit less per cup than all-purpose flour does. So the best thing to do is literally go use a recipe that's designed for whole grains in the first place, or you can call us on the Baker's Hotline and they'll They'll talk you right through it. They'll even find you a recipe that you need.

Okay, so is whole grain pastry flour like cake flour then, or?

Not exactly, but it's pretty similar. It's a softer flour, it just has the bran in it, and the fact that you have, you know, a lot of fat and sugar in it in your cake recipe, it tends to ameliorate the effects of the bran. You're not looking for something that's gonna rise super high like a bread, you're just looking for something that's gonna be moist and tasty.

Okay, great. Well, good, you answered my questions there then. Um, let's see. And, uh, some tree Lindsay wanted to know, would the whole grain flours work for baking breads as well? She bakes a lot of banana breads and would like to have an be a little more healthy. So you did say that.

Yeah, yeah. And it seems a little bit odd, but whole grain flour, a lot of time in a quick bread like that, it's a good idea to do half whole grain flour— doesn't have to be pastry flour, just like regular white, whole wheat would be fine— and half bread flour, believe it or not, because the bread flour will give that loaf a little extra structure. But we have lots of good recipes for that online too. You should Come check us out.

Okay. Do you ever do any of the gluten-free cakes? I know you have great mixes.

Um, yes, I have actually. Um, we've got a bunch of recipes for those online too. The flour blend that we came up with is just amazing stuff. So chocolate cake in particular is generally pretty successful with gluten-free because the cocoa has some fiber in it that helps the whole thing hold together. So chocolate's a good place to start if you've never done one before.

Great. Well, thank you so much for all the information. I think that's pretty much gonna wrap it up. If you have anything else you'd like to add, or Allison, if you have anything to say—

Here she comes!

Here she comes, alright.

I just wanted to say thank you, Chef Dennis Littley, and to everybody who joined us tonight. This is really fun, and I'm looking forward to turning off the camera so I can eat some of this cake next.

You are lucky, you have some cake to pick from. Somebody actually wanted to see the inside of one, but I'm sure we can live vicariously through your telling us later about them.

We'll cut one and post it on Facebook. How's that?

There you go. Or you can also post a picture right to here too. Okay, we can do that. But thank you so much for this great lesson in cake decorating. We'll have to do it again and give us some more advanced tips next time. Okay. See what we can do. And I would think if anybody wants to make something, they can also post their picture to this to show you too what you've made.

Yeah, that'd be fun.

I guess they can send them to you, they could probably post them in other places on your— share them with you on their site if they just put +King Arthur Flour and they want you to see a cake they've made, that way you'll get notice, you'll get a notification, you can see it.

That would be great.

Great. Well, thank you very much everyone, thanks for coming. To see King Arthur Flour help us learn to decorate cakes for one of our community education series, and we'll see you again real soon.

Okay, bye.

Good night.