34.4 Icings, buttercreams and decorating

Keep it cold and safe

Many icings and fillings contain cream, butter or eggs. These are potentially hazardous foods, and cold food is kept at 4°C (40°F) or below, out of the danger zone of 4°C to 60°C (40°F to 140°F).

Whipped cream, used as a topping or filling, has to stay in the refrigerator and come out just before the cake is cut.

Throw out a potentially hazardous food that has not been used within three days of being made. Where a recipe calls for raw egg, a pasteurized product such as pasteurized liquid egg is the safer choice.

The danger zone, cooling and cold holding are taught in full earlier. see chapter 2: Heat: cooling, holding and reheating

Icings

Buttercream is a smooth, creamy icing, often called frosting. You can make it firm for flowers, medium for borders, or thin for covering a cake or writing on it. It colors and flavors easily, but it melts in great heat, so it is a poor choice for a hot venue.

Decorations

• Gum paste: gelatin, cornstarch and sugar, for figures and other sculpted pieces. It is edible but dries very hard.
• Piping: pressing icing through a decorator bag fitted with a metal tip to make lines, swirls, letters, dots, shells, basketweave and latticework.
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• Pulled sugar: sugar boiled with water and corn syrup, then shaped into roses, bows and other designs.
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• Sugar flowers: usually made by hand from a sugar syrup that sets hard, used in place of fresh flowers.
• Dragees and pearls: dragees are hard sugar balls painted silver or gold; pearls are candy beads made to look like real pearls, in many colors and sizes.
• Gold leaf and edible images: edible 24-carat gold, and pictures printed with edible ink on frosting paper.
• Floral wire: wire for building 3-D decorations. It cannot be eaten.
• Petal dust: gives a cake sparkle or sheen.

Decorating techniques

• Airbrushing: spraying food coloring on with a small air pump.
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• Basketweave: a crossing pattern, in fondant or buttercream, that looks like a woven basket.
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• Cornelli: fine, elaborate piping that looks like lace.
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• Chevron, damask, houndstooth and quatrefoil: repeating patterns. Chevron is rows of colored V shapes, usually in fondant. Damask borrows plant, geometric or animal patterns from silk cloth. Houndstooth is a run of broken checks. Quatrefoil is a shape of four leaves or lobes, like a four-leaf clover.
• Hand-painting: painting fine detail onto a cake with food coloring and brushes.
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• Marble and ombre: marble swirls flavors or colors together, inside a cake or in fondant; ombre shades one color into the next, often light to dark.
• Ruffles and Swiss dots: fondant shaped to look like fabric ruffles, and rows of tiny piped dots like those on a bridal veil.

Boards, stands and accessories

• Cake board and cake circle: a cardboard base for the cake; a cake circle is a corrugated round sized for standard round cakes, plain, waxed or decorated. Neither is edible.
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• Pillars and tier separators: supports, in plastic or wood, that hold the tiers of a stacked cake apart.
• Cake stand: a plate raised on a pedestal to show a cake off.
• Side decorations: strings, garlands and other icing work around the sides.
• Wedding extras: cake toppers, bridges or stairs between cakes, fountains set among the tiers, and a backdrop behind the cake for photographs.

Other ways to serve cake

A cupcake is a little cake, usually iced, baked in its own cup-shaped holder. Cupcakes are sometimes served on a tiered stand in place of a single cake. Miniatures are small wedding cakes, decorated one per guest. A groom's cake was traditionally richer than the bride's, often with chocolate or fruit, is served apart from it, and is often decorated around the groom's hobbies.

How to plate a dessert and garnish it is taught earlier. see chapter 28: Five things to plan