Common Mistakes Bakers Do and How to Prevent Them

Each cake decorator wants their cake to be the best. And so even if small blunders may occur anytime, still, its not an excuse to stop trying. We all want to make the best-tasting and the most beautiful (or cute!) cake possible. We want to delight our children and impress our in-laws. Yet we need to be guided by right techniques to stop making huge errors. So here are some tips to avoid some of the biggest difficulties cake decorators face.

1. How can I freeze my cake so it wont dry out easily?

In baking, it is important to plan ahead of time to avoid doing last-minute touches, so sometimes you even have to say no to your own childs demands. But then, would you really do that? It will be useful if you are informed at least twelve hours before you need to deliver them.

To preplan your cake, you need to know how to freeze cakes properly so you can just simply decorate them when the actual occasion comes.

Yet you have to remember that freezing cakes may render them blunt and dry. To prevent this, they must be carefully wrapped and stored without any icing at all.

Cover the cake with two to three layers of plastic wrap and then one layer of aluminum foil to keep both air and moisture out. Properly wrapped and frozen, your cake will remain fresh for up to two months, even longer for heavier cakes such as pound or fruitcakes.

The cake must be removed from the freezer one day before you add icing so the cake can still have time to thaw.

Thaw the cake to room temperature. Now you may encounter a problem in here.

When the cake has icing, it will sweat during defrosting so its not ideal to put icing before freezing the cake.

The cake will end up with soggy icing and droopy decorations. Thats not nice.

So bake cakes as early as possible.

2. How do I prevent filling from overflowing into the sides of the cake?

One huge difficulty when it comes to cake decoration is now being fought almost every day. Its the Battle of the Bulge, and upset bakers are desperately calling out for help.

The question is always how to prevent filling from bulging at the sides of the cake and into the icing.

These are some tips on how to stop fillings from crossing boundaries.

a.) Pipe (with a No.10 round tip or similar large size) an icing dam around the outer edge of each layer to contain the filling. The dam will serve as a barrier and will stop the filling from escaping to the outer edge of the cake.

b.) Cover your entire assembled cake with a crumb coat of a thinned version of your final icing.

c.) Freeze your cake for two to three hours to allow both the cake and crumb coat to firm up.

Together, the icing dam and the crumb coat will provide a seal for your cake to hold the filling. Decorate your cake with the final icing, and voila! No more bulge!

3. Im having problems with crumbs. What can I do?

Do not belittle the power of the little crumbs. They are out to damage the intricate cake decoration you have already done.

Bakers are getting nuts and are still in limbo as to the best solution to the problem.

Have you ever heard of crumb coat? It is actually a very thin layer of glaze or icing that you can put in the assembled cake to make these crumbs stick better into the layer of the cake.

To create a crumb coat, you mix icing with any liquid that is part of the recipe until they become thin. Apply it in the entire cake.

Once everything dries up, the crumb then sticks to the top layer of the cake. You can make the drying process faster by freezing your cake. It does reduce the problem with crumbs so you dont mind about the extra time you have to spend for this.

Hopefully, with these techniques, you can bake almost anything.