Learning How To Make Picture Cakes

Are you interested in learning how to make picture cakes

? If so, you should know that you don't need to invest in all kinds of specialty materials in order to master the technique, but you will need to do some advanced planning and a bit of practice work too. This is because the process often involves hand drawing and some "coloring in" of empty spaces.

The first thing to know, however, is that there are actually several ways you can achieve this technique, including:

High tech printing kits that require the use of edible inks and specialty papers;

Airbrushing kits that allow the cake decorator to project the image on the cake and then to use the airbrushes to create the design;

Homemade buttercream transfers; and

Hand drawn designs using food pens and icing gels.

For this brief discussion, we will focus on the last two methods because these are the most affordable and the most readily available to all kinds of bakers. Both ask the decorator to do a lot of hand drawing and somewhat delicate work, and because of this, it is usually a good idea to make a bunch of practice transfers and drawings before tackling an actual project. As always with cake decorating, practice makes perfect!

The materials for both techniques are quite simple, and include wax paper, icing, piping bags with fine tips, a cutting board the size of the transfer, corn starch, toothpicks and some tape. It is also interesting to note that a lot of professional and amateur cake decorators will also purchase some supplementary supplies that can help to make the background of the cake part of the general image too. For instance, they might purchase aerosol cans of food color, special stencils or cutouts, and specialty piping tips to create unique borders and edges.

In the buttercream transfer process, the cake decorator must select the graphic or image that they wish to appear on the cake. They then tape this to their cutting board or flat surface and position the wax paper over it. Using a gel in the appropriate color and a fine tip, they trace the outline of the shape. It is best to let this setup a bit before beginning to color in the design, and most decorators tend to work in "layers", filling in the outermost colors first and the colors that will be "behind" other colors last. Once the coloring in is completed, the decorator can gently smooth the back of the transfer to make sure it is as level as possible. This is allowed to setup for a while, and then frosting in the same color as that used for the body of the cake is applied to the back of the transfer to prevent any "bleeding" of color when it is applied to the cake.

This entire thing is then moved to the freezer for several hours before being applied to the cake. Some touchup work might be required, but usually the image is "picture perfect". The hand drawn transfers are almost identical to the buttercream with the exception being that only the outline is transferred to the wax paper, and without any freezing, the paper is then placed on the cake. The lines are allowed to setup before the paper is flipped, and this allows the decorator to then complete the coloring process directly on the surface of the cake.

by: John Knollwood

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