I'm going to share 11 secrets that bakeries use to make cake decorating quick, easy and more
affordable and to make their cakes look beautiful and taste delicious! Let's start with secrets for
speed. Minimize time spent cleaning up by using a baking sheet or tray to catch falling ingredients.
Sprinkles are the worst so this is great for those!Aas you decorate the sprinkles will fall
down and bounce off the cake board but the rim of the tray will catch them and when you're finished
decorating just tip the tray so that all of the sprinkles roll down into one corner and pour them
back into the jar or packet to use for another project. Fondant is beautiful but it's very time
consuming to work with. For a much quicker way to make cake toppers bakeries will use cookies
instead. Remember to press a paper straw or cookie stick into the bag before baking. Not only
are these much faster to shape than fondant and faster to decorate with buttercream, they're also
delicious so they're sure to actually be eaten! So, those secrets help decorate cakes quickly
what about ways that bakeries make things easier for cake decorators? To make scheduling easier
and increase productivity bakeries hardly ever bake, frost and decorator cakes on the same day.
The secret for spreading out the stages of making a cake is the freezer. After baking cakes let them
cool and then wrap them in two layers of cling film or saran wrap. This makes them airtight.
Put them in the freezer for up to a month and this means you can mix double or quadruple batches of
batter to save time, baking several cakes at the same time and then pull them out of the freezer
on different dates to frost and decorate then. If you make cakes I'm sure someone has asked you for
a four tier cake to serve two people! Tier cakes are gorgeous but not always practical and that's
where dummies come in. These styrofoam cylinders look just like cakes when they're frosted and
decorated and make it easy for bakeries and cost effective for customers to create tear
cakes of dreams without having leftover cake for weeks. Minimizing waste, lowering costs and
raising profits is a priority for bakeries and for anyone who wants to make money with their cakes.
Wasted ingredients mean higher costs and lower profits so bakeries will reuse buttercream
leftover from frosting cakes to pipe borders or swirls onto the cake or they'll add colour to
the bowl to tint another colour of buttercream for the decorations on this cake or on the next cake.
To stretch any investment in tools use cake decorating tools for cookies and vice versa.
For example cookie cutters provide a neat outline for designs on cakes which can then be piped onto.
Using cookie cutters for this is much quicker than printing or sketching a design yourself.
If you're buying cookie cutters choose shapes that can be used for lots of designs.
Simple shapes are the most versatile like a set of circles or squares of different sizes.
Bakeries love piping because it's quick and easy and it makes cakes look highly decorated.
Piping bags are expensive but using parchment paper you can make your own piping bags for a
fraction of the price. Cut a triangle and fold one corner down and underneath the bottom corner. Do
the same with the other corner. Pinch them and fold them over to make a cone which you
can fill with buttercream and then cut the tip off to pipe a message or a border or a design.
You could use a whole bottle to tint buttercream red or black but bakeries limit how much they need
to use with this trick. First, use gel not liquid colors because they're more concentrated so you
need a lot less. Then add just enough to make your buttercream a dark pink or very light red.
You would need almost double this amount of gel to make a bold red color.
Now put a lid on the bowl or cover it tightly with cling film or saran wrap. Leave it for
an hour or overnight and ta-da! Bright red buttercream with a minimal amount of gel!
Okay, why do people order cakes from bakeries? They're beautiful and they're delicious. What are
the secrets for that? To get super smooth frosting bakeries use metal or cast iron turntables which
have a very smooth spin and that creates very smooth frosting without dents or indents.
Plastic turntables are much cheaper but their wobbly spin makes it almost impossible
to get perfectly smooth frosting and any cake decoration looks its best on smooth frosting.
For flawless cakes bakeries refrigerate them after decorating them until they're picked up or
delivered because when cakes are cold they're firm and the decorations are stable so they'll survive
the vibrations of a car and any sudden stopping and starting and the frosting won't sink or get
bulges in the sides, which happens when cakes sit out at room temperature for a long time.
To ensure that cakes stay moist even though they're rarely baked and decorated on the same
day they're picked up, the secret ingredient used by bakeries is simple syrup. This is the formula
for moist cakes even days after baking them. The recipe is super simple - no pun intended! Put
equal amounts of water and sugar into a pan, bring to a simmer over medium heat, let it cool and
then pour it into a squeezy bottle. Drizzle over your cake layers paying special attention to the
edges and this will keep the cake layers moist for several days, giving you the flexibility to bake,
frost and decorate cakes in stages if you want to divide the work between different days.
I hope you found these secrets useful. Subscribe for a new cake decorating tutorial
every week and check out my online cake school for lots of courses on
hundreds of cake designs and techniques. Thank you for watching and happy caking!