Baking Your Cake and Decorating It, Too Quiz

Answer: Wilton

The Wilton company, in business since 1929, is a very good source for baking and decorating supplies, for amateur home bakers as well as professionals. The company makes just about any cake decorating ingredient or tool that you could possibly need, as well as candy and chocolate making supplies, and also provides helpful publications and seminars for anyone from very beginners to experts.

Their products are readily available online, both on their own website and other sources such as Amazon and e-Bay, as well as in specialty stores and even Wal-Mart.

Answer: Couplers

The coupler is a two-part device. One part goes into your pastry bag (also called piping bag; it's the same thing), pushed as far through the triangular end as possible. Then the metal tip that you need fits over the coupler, and the second part of the coupler, a plastic ring, gets screwed onto the first part, sandwiching the metal tip between the two pieces, securing it onto the bag. You don't absolutely need a coupler, you can just slide the tip itself into the opening of the bag; however, using couplers makes the job infinitely easier if you are going to be using multiple tips and multiple frosting colours. With the couplers, you need only prepare one pastry bag for every colour of frosting that you are using and you only need one of each style of icing tip that you wish to use, because you can easily and quickly just unscrew the couplers and switch the tips around.

Answer: Sure, if you and the people you're serving like lemon

Vanilla is one of the most common flavours in baking, but you can substitute other flavours for variety. For cakes and cupcakes, it's a good idea to make sure your cake batter and frosting are flavoured with the same ingredient, or with complementary flavours (for example, a chocolate cake with frosting flavoured with maple extract).

It's also important to note that many other extracts are much stronger than vanilla extract; if you are substituting something like lemon extract or peppermint extract in the place of vanilla, it's a good idea to start with the half the amount and then add more only if needed, to make sure the flavour doesn't become overwhelming. Extracts don't significantly change the colour of batter because they're used in quite small amounts, but if your aim is a very, very white cake and it calls for a fair amount of vanilla, you can buy clear vanilla extract to keep the pure white colour. Extracts also keep a fairly long time, even after being opened, as long as nothing else gets inside the bottle.

Answer: Any of these alternatives would be fine

Two 9" round cake pans take close to the same amount of batter as both one 9"x13" and one 10" Bundt cake pan (around 15 cups of cake batter). This amount would also make about 24 cupcakes, but it would depend on how much you fill each muffin cup. You could also use other round cake pans that are close in size such as 8" or 10", or even any baking pan you may have handy, as long as you're careful not to overfill the pan with batter and check on the cake while it's baking to ensure it's not done too soon. Remember though, having extra batter is better than having not enough; choosing 8" pans and not having room in the pans for all the batter will work out much better than trying to make 14" layers that come out very thin. You may also have to change your game plan if you completely change the type of pan you bake the cake in; for example, if you go with a Bundt pan, it might make more sense to abandon your plan to frost it with buttercream and choose a glaze instead.

Answer: Royal icing hardens upon sitting

Royal icing, commonly used on cookies and gingerbread houses as well as cakes, is made mostly of liquid and confectioner's sugar; it doesn't have the fat/grease content of buttercream. For this reason, it's important to clean your tools very well if you typically use buttercream but are now going to use royal icing; many serious cake decorators keep a separate, full set of tools for using with varying kinds of icing. A reusable pastry bag that once had buttercream in it cannot be used for royal icing, as the grease residue that gets left behind never fully washes out and can cause the royal icing to separate.

Royal icing can certainly be dyed any colour you wish (though some colours may appear a bit different in royal icing than in buttercream) and can be used to do any decorations, but it does harden, whereas buttercream only develops a slight crust.

Answer: Yes

You absolutely can make a stable, usable frosting with either shortening or butter. However, if you're wondering which would be better, this is a great debate in the cake world. There is one camp which says, "Never use shortening, it's called buttercream for a reason!" and another which says "Never use butter! Shortening is far better." There are also people who choose to use half butter and half shortening.

The main selling point of using vegetable shortening is that it produces a pure white frosting, whereas butter will give your white icing a yellow-ish tinge.

This might not necessarily be a problem, but it could be in the case of dying the frosting; if you want a colour such as pale pink, you're much more likely to get the shade you desire if you start with pure white. Starting with a yellow-ish white might yield more of a peachy colour than a pale pink. If you do choose to use shortening for your butter cream, you should also add butter flavour extract because buttercream is supposed to have a delicious, buttery taste.

Answer: Crumb coat

The crumb coat stage is done to seal in loose crumbs from the top and sides of your cake before applying your final layer of frosting. If the crumbs aren't sealed in, you could easily drag some into thick layer of frosting that you're applying. If you have a chocolate cake and a white frosting, even a few crumbs could disturb the clean look of your final masterpiece. After applying the thin crumb coat, the cake needs to be refrigerated for a couple of hours, until the frosting develops a crust, and then you can proceed with decorating.

'Soft ball' is a term in candy making and refers to a point in the process of heating up sugar and water. 'Tempering' means heating and cooling chocolate to a certain temperature to use in making chocolate molds, or for dipping and coating other foods in chocolate. 'Torting' means to split one cake layer horizontally in half to make two layers (so if you baked two layers, and tort both of them, you'll have four thin layers).

Answer: Flower nail

A flower nail looks like a regular nail, but with a very thin body and a large, flat head. It can be helpful in making many sorts of frosting flowers, but for making roses, you first build a base on the nail head with frosting, with a bud shape in the centre, and then add the petals, one at a time. According to some experts and instructors, there should be three petals on the top layer, then five petals in the middle layer, angled out more from the bud, and seven petals on the bottom layer, angled out even more.

When you're happy with your rose, simply slide your cake spatula under it to lift it off the flower nail, and apply it to your cake. You can first squeeze a small mound of frosting onto the cake and place the rose on the mound, especially if you want to make an arrangement with the flowers at varying angles.

Answer: Yellow

Gel paste colourings are far more effective for dying frosting than liquid food colouring drops, because gel paste colours are much more concentrated. It generally takes only a very small amount of gel paste to achieve your desired colour, whereas you might have to keep adding and adding liquid drops, which will thin out your icing.

There are also concentrated powder colours that work well, but are less readily available for the general public to purchase. Note also that gel colours for dying frosting are not the same thing as decorator gel which is sold in tubes next to the canned frosting in supermarkets; the supermarket tubes are meant to be used as is right out of the tube, usually for writing on cakes or for small details, such as on sugar cookies.

There are a few exceptions to the general rule of only needing a small amount of gel paste colour, and these exceptions are dark, deep colours like brown, black and dark or vibrant red. For these colours, you'll most likely need to keep adding lots and lots of colour to get it dark enough, which will start to affect the taste of your icing; by the time you get a nice deep black, your icing will be bitter. For black and brown, this can be vastly improved by starting with a chocolate frosting instead of white.

In fact, for brown, you may not even need to add additional brown colour, if the chocolate colour will suit your needs. Red is trickier; you can use regular red colour in a white frosting, and then only use the red frosting sparingly if tastes off, or, if you need to cover a large area with a vibrant red, Wilton makes a specific gel paste for this called No-Taste Red, which does not contain the red dye which lends a bitter taste.

Answer: Paint stripes of colour inside your pastry bag and then fill it with white frosting

To achieve the streaked frosting effect, you simply use a small, clean paintbrush (a different brush for each colour) and dip it into the jar of gel paste colouring, then paint a stripe directly on the inside of your pastry bag. In this example, you could paint three stripes, one of each colour, in a triangular shape, or you could paint multiple sets of the three stripe colours right next to each other, or whatever you want! When you've got your stripes painted, simply fill the bag with the frosting and when you squeeze it out, it will be striped. For a softer, paler streak, you can mix the colours with a small amount of white frosting, then paint stripes of frosting in your bag instead of stripes of straight colour, then fill with plain white frosting.