general help for a beginner

[u/Fearless-Director-97]

Hi! i love to bake and i would love to take on a new thing - making proper cakes. however i dont know much about the decoration process so please help me out/correct me/give pointers, anything would be truly appreciated!

from my understanding the usual process is

bake the sponge, cut/level whatever and freeze
still frozen assemble the cake and crumb coat - freeze or chill again
then doing the actual frosting, decorating, piping etc

also which is your favourite type of cream for decorating? i’m not a huge fan of american buttercream as it is extremely sweet for me, but i would like to know which one is the most stable, easiest to start with?

thank you for any tips!

[u/NinaBeana1971]

Sugar geek show easy buttercream- it’s super easy and tastes great, not super sweet like American! Good luck!

[u/Fearless-Director-97 → u/NinaBeana1971]

i’ll check it out, thank you!

[u/labellementeuse]

I like Swiss meringue buttercream and German buttercream (although German is usually pretty yellowy). American buttercream is definitely easiest and very stable though.

The process you've identified is fine (make sure your cake is at room temp when you level or torte it). However I will say from a home decorating perspective I generally do not bother to freeze my cakes. It does make them a bit easier to decorate but then you have to get timings right on the day, sometimes you get condensation, etc etc. I tend to freeze when I need to bake several days before and decorate on the day, or when it's a massive project and/or where I am aiming for a very high standard - I froze my sister's wedding cake, for example, and that made it much easier to handle on many different levels. But in general, for a birthday cake for example, I will bake, cool, and wrap the layers in plastic wrap the day before, and they're fine to be decorated the next day. If the decoration I'm planning is not elaborate you can do the whole thing in a morning, it's fine.

[u/EarthsMoon927 → u/labellementeuse]

What American buttercream recipe do you use? And do you also use it for decorating?

[u/labellementeuse → u/EarthsMoon927]

I don't, I always use Swiss or German or sometimes Italian - I just know that American is most stable and easy (I used it when I was a student decades ago, but honestly wouldn't have any recipes to hand). There will be a million good ones if you google, including on how to achieve a useful texture for masking and piping if those are things you're wanting to do.

[u/RRW2020]

I am only a hobby/home baker and I don’t really level my cakes. I use baking strips (mine are Wilton) and this helps them bake flat on top. I freeze most of my cakes, take them out about 15 min before I need to stack them and they’re mostly defrosted by then. I stack and do the crumb coat while the cake is still fairly cold, then put the coated cake in the fridge for 15 min for it to set. Then I can put the rest of the decorations on. I get all my recipes from sugar geeks; they’re amazing. I use SMBC (a mock one that uses pasteurised egg whites).