It’s a chilly Saturday morning, St. Laurent is eerily quiet, and Annie and I are in my cozy kitchen, hunched over a double-layered vanilla cake, meticulously piping cobwebs onto the side of our grave-yard themed creation. The muscles in my hands are cramping as I focus harder than I have since my Stats final last year.
Annie Xu is a second year economics student at McGill, and is in the process of starting up a small bakery business of her own in the years to come. Her father is a professional oil-painter and her mother is also an artist. She had been trained by her parents to sketch and draw since she was very young. Its no wonder that doing anything with her hands—cake decorating, sketching, arts & crafts—is second-nature to her.
I invited Annie to my house for a one-on-one lesson on how to ice the perfect Halloween cake. Now I know we are a little late for Halloween, but the tips she showed me (which I will reveal here) apply to any icing project.
It turns out you don’t need all that fancy equipment to ice an all-out “you made that?!” masterpiece. Annie showed me in this simple step-by-step how I can impress everyone at my post-Halloween party using just the things I have in my kitchen!
Things You Will Need:
- Pre-made icing in several colors (however many you like!). Annie prepared red, brown, blue, white and yellow butter-icing and had it in piping-bags.
- Parchment Paper or piping bags
- Scissors
- A ready-baked round cake. If you want that cool layered effect when you slice the cake, baking two layers of cake is definitely encouraged!
- A long knife
- A spoon
- Candy! We used a small army of ghosts, bats, and zombie head candies along with Reeses Pieces, pumpkin candies and hard candy shaped like bones. Be creative!
How to Ice a Cake:
1. Lay out all the equipment on a clean surface
2. Annie made two layers of cake, so we iced the top surface of the first layer. We didn’t have to be too careful with this part because the icing gets covered with the second cake layer and no one sees it!
Now carefully place the top layer onto the iced surface.
3. Now you’re ready to start icing the exterior of the cake. Take the piping bag containing your desired color for the top surface, and cut open a slit with the scissors. Make sure the slit isn’t too small or too big—you want to be able to pipe big strips of icing without making a mess.
4. Twist the top of the piping bag, allowing the icing to move toward the slit. Keep twisting until you feel the bag becoming taut under your hands. It should look like this (see below):
5. Keeping both hands on the piping bag—one at the top and one in the middle of the bag as shown in the image above—pipe a thick border of icing on the outside of the top surface.
6. Repeat step 5, icing an inner circle and then a dollop in the middle.
7. Next, take a knife and spread the icing evenly over the surface, making sure to cover every part—you don’t want patches of missing or thin icing! Annie’s Tip: “Go over the surface a few times until you are completely satisfied. I’m a bit of a perfectionist so I tend to take a while to get it right, and that’s totally okay.”
8. Yay! Now you’ve got a nice base to decorate—this served as the earthy base of our grave-yard scene.
9. Now cut a slit the same size as before in the piping bag containing your desired color for the side of the cake, and pipe a thick strip around the borders of the cake. Annie’s experienced so she just picked up the cake and piped the side on with one hand, but for those less confident (ahem, me), pipe the icing on with both hands on the piping bag and have the cake resting on the table. Or if a friend wants to help, get them to hold the cake up while you pipe!
10. Once you’ve got two thick strips of icing around the entire outside border of the cake, you are ready to even it out like you did with the top. With a knife, spread the icing evenly over the surface, leaving no empty patches. Annie’s Tip: Wet a long knife (a bread knife works fine) and using the back of the knife, that is, the side you don’t use to cut with, scrape along the sides to smoothen out the effect. Keep wetting the knife as you go, but make sure the water you use is not too hot or you will melt the icing.
Check out Annie being a pro! Holding the cake up allows you to spot different thicknesses in the icing so you can even it out.
11. Now you’re ready to pipe the borders. Borders serve two purposes: to add dimension to your cake, and to hide the unsightly meeting of the side-icing and the top-icing. Take the piping bag containing your desired border color, and cut a small slit in the end of the piping bag. This hole should be a lot smaller than the previous ones.
Annie’s Tip: Practice on a surface before any sort of delicate icing process. This way you can make sure the size of the slit you made is appropriate. We used a knife to practice her border design.
12. Pipe the bottom borders, moving up and down to form a ruffle-like pattern along the edge of the cake. Each time you finish making a tiny peak, release your grip on the bag slightly and press down into the edge.
13. Repeat step 11, icing a ruffle-like pattern on the top border. Now all you’ve got left to do is the decorating (personally, it’s my favorite part)!
Be creative. Annie had brought all sorts of cute and creepy edibles to deck our cake out with, but I wanted a 3-dimensional tombstone, complete with a sign wishing my roommate a happy birthday—something we didn’t have. So we had to improvise. Annie’s Tip: “Improvise using anything. I’m known to be pretty resourceful, so if I want to do something but don’t have the equipment to do so, I look around for anything at all that will do the job. That’s why kitchens are so wonderful—they contain so many knick knacks and treasures.”
To make an improvised sign like we did, use a thin piece of cardboard or thick paper (we cut out a tombstone shape from a packet of Godivas) and prop it up with either a toothpick, or in our case, a lollipop. Cover the piece with icing using a knife, and pipe a cute message on it!
The following are some decorating ideas that we came up with for our spooky-themed cake. Use our ideas or come up with your own, but don’t be afraid to think outside the box! We made a path leading to the tombstone out of Reese’s Pieces, and using our fingers, placed a small dollop of orange icing on each one, making little flames.
Don’t forget the sides of your cake! We piped on some cobwebs and stuck some purple bats and ghosts candies to the side of ours.
To bring the graveyard scene to life (excuse the pun), we piped a paved path using white icing, and went wild with the bones, zombie-heads, and pumpkin candies. We even added a creepy gummy-eyeball to top it all off!
And voilà! You’re done! Now you can impress everyone with your decorating skills and determination, and you even have the right to boast about how you did this one all by yourself.
This is us in my living room with our finished work! Looking pleased as punch is an understatement.
A huge thank-you to Annie for taking time out of her extremely busy schedule to teach me (and all of our lovely HerCampus McGill readers) how to ice a cake in a quick and easy way!
Images taken by author.