Ready your piping bags and spatulas, food coloring and edible glitter, buttercream, and, yes, even your fondant, because October 10 is National Cake Decorating Day. We’re not entirely sure who decided this needed to be a thing, but then again, just getting to eat sweets seems like justification enough.
Cake decorating does have a vague starting point, and it’s both more and less recent than you might think. It gained popularity in 17th-century Europe, coinciding with cake pans being a common possession. As with most indulgences of that period, it was relegated mostly to the upper classes to impress guests, according to this history by CakeFlix. The general masses weren’t reached until the mid to late 19th century with the rise in the production of baking powder and the invention of electric ovens, which, surely you can imagine, made things a whole lot easier. In 1929, the first of its kind, the Wilton School of Cake Decorating, opened for enrollment in Illinois and remains open to this day.
If you’re a novice whose interest has been piqued or even an expert just looking for inspiration, our collection is well-stocked with cookbooks so you can have your cake and eat it too.
Cake Decorating With Fresh Flowers
Liven up your wedding cakes with fresh flowers! Cake artist Jenny McCoy teaches you how to decorate five elegant cakes using a variety of beautiful blooms. Plus get her pro tips on balancing colors, maintaining food safety, and more.
Startup Library: Cake Decorating
Ready to sweeten up your skills? Explore the sugar art of cake decorating with Jenny McCoy as your expert guide. In this comprehensive beginner’s class, you’ll learn how to bake and construct a variety of one-tiered frosted cakes with professional-quality results. Along the way, discover essential tools, materials and techniques, including fondant and buttercream, sugar flowers, piping, hand modeling and much more.
Cake decorating for beginners: 24 stunning step-by-step cake designs for all occasions
Cake Decorating for Beginners is a wealth of useful information for avid amateur bakers. Combining nuggets of valuable advice and popular projects from the Modern Cake Decorator series, the book leads the reader from the first stages to the last embellishments, including baking and icing your cake, and features a range of exciting, innovative but accessible techniques for decoration such as stenciling, using cutters, piping, painting and airbrushing for a polished, professional finish. The cumulative knowledge of authors Cassie Brown, Christine Flinn, Sandra Monger and Stephanie Weightman makes this book a must-have, go-to guide—the ultimate cake decoration compendium.
It's the prettiest trend in baking, and Sear shows how to use edible flowers and herbs to decorate your cakes and bakes. She shows how to select and use fresh edible flowers, as well as how to preserve them through drying, crystalising, pressing and suspending in sugar. Readers choose treats such as a cupcake wreath, a floral krispie cake topper, and even edible faux frames topped with pressed flowers. -- adapted from back cover and perusal of book
Layered: baking, building, and styling spectacular cakes by Tessa Huff
It's time to venture beyond vanilla and chocolate and take your baking skills up a notch. We're talking layers--two, three, four, or more! Create sky-high, bakery-quality treats at home with Tessa Huff's 150 innovative recipes, which combine new and exciting flavors of cake, fillings and frostings-- everything from pink peppercorn cherry to bourbon butterscotch and pumpkin vanilla chai to riesling rhubarb and raspberry chocolate stout. Including contemporary baking methods and industry tips and tricks, Layered covers every decorating technique you'll ever need with simple instructions and gorgeous step-by-step photos that speak to bakers of every skill level--and to anyone who wants to transform dessert into layer upon layer of edible art.
Dress your cupcake : bake them! dress them! eat them! by Joanna Farrow
Provides instructions for decorating cupcakes with amusing and whimsical figures and characters, and includes guidelines for icing cupcakes, handling fondant, and using melted hard candies and chocolate.
!["What's new, cupcake? : [ingeniously simple designs for every occasion]"](/sites/default/files/styles/quarter_width_embedded/public/2024-09/what%27s%20new%20cupcake.jpg?itok=wyInS_DG)
What's new, cupcake? : [ingeniously simple designs for every occasion] by Alan Richardson
The endlessly imaginative duo who turned cupcaking into a national pastime is back, with utterly new, eye-popping creations anyone can make.