287055 Thu Mar 29 09:57:34 -0800 2001 10 27 General Chowhounding Topics 0 1541992 Hello all, I am to be married on June 2nd 2001 and I'm preparing everything myself since I am poor. Well I am working on a cake (preparing model cakes each week) for the wedding. I am looking for someone that knows of a confectionary arts guild or club in New York City. I know little about cake decorating. I purchased a book to help, but would love some advice on bare minimum decorating tools. ie what tips to buy. New York cake and bake has a lot to choose from but they aren't helpful. Thank you! swilliam@amnh.org Thu Mar 29 09:57:34 -0800 2001 0 Sara Williams 1 1541995 I don't know of any guilds, etc., but I do have some suggestions. FIRST, and most important, keep it simple. It is your wedding, and you have lots of other things to worry about. Non piped decorations, such as ribbons or fresh flowers can be beautiful, and just need to be placed on the cake. If you use these you will just need to pipe borders around the edges of each layer. For these you need plain round tips and closed and open star tubes. Consider the size of your cake when choosing the tips, you may want to buy several of each type in different sizes. Look at a variety of baking and cake decorating books to get ideas and to see what styles you like. I recommend: Weddings by Martha Stewart (I know, but there are some beautiful cakes there) The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum Books by Colette Peters and Dede Wilson. Sylvia Weinstock also has a book out. The Cupcake Cafe Cookbook Go through these and see what you like. Choose a few things that you really want to have on your cake, and concentrate on learning those techniques Scale and symmetry are important, so concentrate on these. My personal opinion is that taste is the most important thing. The standard recipe for wedding cake frosting is confectioner's sugar, Crisco, and imitation vanilla. This is because the thing considered most important is that the frosting be white, which you can't get if you use butter or real vanilla. The fact that it tastes terrible doesn't seem to matter. I once took a wedding cake course taught by the White House pastry chef. If you have any questions, feel free to email me directly. Thu Mar 29 10:36:15 -0800 2001 1541992 0 ruth arcone 1 1541997 Any inclination to go the fresh flower route? I don't know how your hand-eye skills are, but it might be easiest to master just a couple of simple piped shapes, and use flowers, rose petals, etc. for more decorative effects - the stuff from the Cup Cake Cafe is just beautiful, but a) you need to have a painterly sense of color creation and b) unless you are REALLY good at small repetative work, getting their more extreme effects can induce hysteria. For my sister's July wedding some years ago, we made cake layers with flavored buttercream and filling, poured fondant over each tier, and then decorated with pansies, rose petals and little paper butterflies her friend found in a Chinatowm shop. It must have been pretty convincing - when we assembled the cake at the outdoor buffet, a grasshopper landed on one of the flowers, and stayed there through the whole reception. It was a quick and easy, but still pretty and tasty summer wedding cake. To give you an example of the timeline for making that cake: Two days before the wedding, I flew out from NYC to CA with prepared fondant, my big kitchen-aid mixer, frosting spatulas, the cake tier underpinings and recipes, picked up some genoise sheets cakes from a good bakery on my way up to the country. Next day (wedding day minus 1) went shopping for ingredients for the buttercreams, and fillings, made them, cut the cake layers. Midday, looked over flowers and decorations, picked out what I wanted to use, set aside. Later in the evening, when the intense Sierra Nevada heat died off, assembled the layers of cake, filling and buttercream , poured fondant over each tier. Walked the cake over to the one air-conditioned building on my grandparents property, turned the temp. way down. Early afternoon of the wedding day, decorated the cake with the flowers. If we'd used buttercream piping, I'd probably have done it then as well, rather than the night before. Assembled the tiers when the buffet set up was ready. Many compliments, happy bride, relaxed sister/bridesmaid. All cool. So, as you were asking for a bare minimum kinda thing, the only decorating tools I used were a long flexible icing spatula, to push around the fondant. You could use a little dab of fondant or leftover buttercream to keep the flowers in place, but I think I just gently pushed, and they stuck. May or may not be what you had in mind, but thought I'd pass my experience along. Christine Thu Mar 29 15:38:55 -0800 2001 1541992 0 Christine DiBona 2 1542004 I agree--fresh flowers can look wonderful. There are little doodads that can be used to both keep the flowers in place and keep them fresh. I have no idea what they're called. They look like little plastic test tubes with a point at the closed end and a tight-fitting rubber cap with a tiny hole in it. You fill the things with water, cap them, then push the stem through the hole and jab the whole thing into the cake, deeply enough so that the test tube doesn't show, just the flower. You might be able to get these things at a florist or at a cake decorating supply place. If you do go the fresh flower route, whether you use these things or just artfully strew flowers or petals over the cake, make sure that you ascertain that the flowers are neither toxic nor have been treated with anything that is. Thu Mar 29 18:15:53 -0800 2001 1541997 0 Jill Rovitzky Black 1 1541999 In the Julia Child book, "Baking With Julia" (from a TV series), there is a Martha Stewart recipe for a wedding cake that is decorated with marzipan cherries or raspberries and some very basic piping techniques. It looked a lot easier than learning how to do intricate flowers. If you can find a tape of the series, you can see how the whole thing is baked and decorated. If I remember correctly, it took two half hour episodes to do it. Thu Mar 29 16:00:11 -0800 2001 1541992 0 rjka 1 1542014 You might get some ideas from New York Cake and Baking Distributors (56 W. 22, 212-675-2253). They're a little pricey and service is difficult to get when they're busy, but they have tons of wonderful decorating gizmos. They might even have classes there, or suggest where you can go (where you don't have to drop $300 just to show up). I get all my hard-to-find molds and cookie cutters there, but they star in decoration. Fri Mar 30 10:20:25 -0800 2001 1541992 0 Loeb 1 1542019 another thing i love the looks of and that's easy is sugared fruit; martha stewart (i know, i know) has that chocolate wedding cake with sugared fruit, but it would look great on a white- or yellow-frosted cake too. or even gorgeous fresh fruit. depending on the season you could get some beautiful berries or grapes and some nice lime leaves or something. Fri Mar 30 12:45:44 -0800 2001 1541992 0 emily 1 1542021 Congratulations on the wedding and be proud that you are not going to fork over $800 bucks for a cake you can easily do yourself! I have made a couple of wedding cakes for friends and despite my desire to produce a fairy tale perfect cake, I never can. So I have settled for a look that Martha Stewart would never dare offer and my friends LOVE IT -- it's homey, artistic, dramatic and unique (and never the same twice.) Much depends on the look you want, but my recommendation is to do something simple and deeply forgiving. My nomination is a slightly easier version of a Martha Stewart cake (I know I know, but it is easy and beautiful and ANYONE can do it). Make the cake layers that you want a couple of weeks before the wedding , wrap really well and freeze them. The night before the wedding, make your frosting (white, for this version) then make -- this will sound weird -- phyllo roses. Get phyllo pastry sheets, let them defrost (they are usually frozen), melt much butter, then trim the phyllo sheets into long thin rectangles with a sharp knife -- easy, just cut it into strips. Cover the phyllo strips you are not using with a damp towel. Brush melted butter on the first strip and then roll it up from a short end to look like a rose with a little stem. Play around with it. It's easy. When you get them all done (make a lot more than you think you will need) put them in a lowish oven and bake until they are crisp but not brown (they might start to turn , but I like them a little golden. It gives the finished cake depth, and reminds me of old lace). Let them cool then store them in an airtight container until the wedding. On the day of the wedding, assemble the cake, ice it, then put phyllo roses all over it -- just jam it into the icing -- and dust the entire thing with powdered sugar (make sure you use a sifter). The phyllo tastes rich and wonderful with the butter and your guests eyes will pop out -- they will have no idea how you made it --- it is sort of abstract and beautiful and looks like a tightly packed bouquet of roses. You can toss on some edible flowers (nastrutiums, johhny jump ups or organic roses ...no pesticides!) for color if you want, or make white chocolate curls or bark (melt, spread on an uncoated cookie sheet, curl it up as it starts to harden with a big spatula) to cover your mistakes. YOu could also skip the phyllo roses and just make an enormous amount of white chocolate bark and cover the entire thing with it. People will love it. I would suggest making a smallish cake for show and a large sheet cake decorated similarly but kept out of sight for serving the crowd. Put your effort into the smaller, easier cake that everyone will see. Don't attempt to mimic a cake that a French pastry chef has worked years to learn to decorate. Yours will never live up to the "original" in your own mind and you will be disappointed. Make something unique and wonderful that broadcasts joyfully: I MADE THIS! You're the bride! You get to do whatever you want and everyone has to stand up and applaud! Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "Never be daunted in public." The wonderful writer MFK Fisher one upped him by writing instead, "Never be daunted in private." Have a great day! I wish I could make the cake for you so you would have one less thing to worry about! Pam Fri Mar 30 17:55:59 -0800 2001 1541992 0 pam 2 1542026 My mother made my wedding cake from the silver cake recipe in the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook (the 1950 one) and froze the layers, as you mentioned. On my wedding day, we had to frost and decorate it! Fortunately my sister and my uncle (now deceased) pitched in, showing unexpected skills making frosting swirls, flowers and piping. This was a delicious, very conventional cake - of course, with butter and none of those synthetic goos one sees in commercial baking. The very sponteneity of the process was wonderful - it may not have been the most boffo socko wedding cake ever, but it was a labor of love. what a family wedding is all about anyway. Fri Mar 30 19:23:39 -0800 2001 1542021 0 jen kalb 1 1542022 Not for everyone, but for my wedding, I baked 2 square layers each of 4 different flavored cake, and froze them. That morning, someone whipped a large volume of cream, matched them up and put them together into a two-layer foursquare cake. The guests enjoyed it. Tasted lots better than beautiful bakery cake, IMHO. Fri Mar 30 18:26:14 -0800 2001 1541992 0 ironmom 1 1542029 Thank you so much! Your advice is quite helpful I will have to keep an eye on this site! I'll be checking back soon. Thank you again everyone. happy eating!!! Fri Mar 30 21:48:47 -0800 2001 1541992 0 Sara Williams