Compendium of Cake Decorating Techniques: 300 tips, techniques and trade secrets

Sept 13

We are all thinking of icing the Xmas cake and hence a plethora of cake decorating books hit the market. This is an all round book. The front cover gives you a fair idea of what is inside. Cakes of all descriptions, decorated in different ways. You'll find an amazing 300 tips, techniques and trade secrets within the pages of this book. It is not a massive tome, merely a 160 page paperback. The book starts with Cake Basics, where you'll find equipment and tools you need, cake recipes for square and round tins including pound, chocolate and fruit cakes. There are also many very useful tips in this section. Do you know how to add extra moistness to a pound cake? Section 2 is all about fondant, its varieties and how to use them.This section is quite detailed. It goes from the basic covering a sponge cake to fantastic creations with stencils, writing, and fondant roses or characters. Section 3 is about the love of my life in cake decorating - buttercream. It includes how to make, cover a cake, create different finishes, piping and more. Did I say I love buttercream best? Section 4 is all about chocolate. Learn how to work with chocolate including tempering, ganache and decorating. This book also includes how to make and use templates, with some examples for you to use. I would recommend this to anyone who loves to make cakes. Or anyone who buys a shop bought one to decorate.

Oct 13

This is quite simply fantastic. It's especially perfect if you have been watching The Great British Bake Off and you're suddenly itching to take your baking to the next level. It's so cute, so accessible if you haven't decorated a cake before, so useful and so challenging if you already decorate a lot, it's just such a perfect book. I couldn't stop looking at this when I received it from Search Press. It immediately answered a lot of my questions, such as if you can lay fresh flowers on a cake and how to do this, and how you will need more colouring for marzipan than fondant as it is not naturally white. Carol has split the book into four sections - Cake Basics, Fondant, Buttercream and Chocolate. At the end of the book are lots of templates for you to use to decorate your cakes. To give you an example of how technically useful this book will be - there is a chocolate cake, a fruit cake recipe and a pound cake in a table so you can adapt the ingredients for eight sizes of cake - especially useful if you are baking a wedding cake. She tells you exactly how to calculate the position of the dowels between a tiered wedding cake. She covers writing on fondant, moulds, cutters and crimpers and making fondant figures - an amazingly illustrated section of the book. Just simply adorable. In the buttercream section she covers piping animals and faces, frozen buttercream transfers and flowers. The Chocolate section covers tempering chocolate, ganache, making a chocolate lace bowl, chocolate cake pops and truffles.

Oct 13

A great guide for the beginner and intermediate sugarcrafter alike, this comprehensive title contains over 300 professional fixes, insider tips and money-saving secrets to help improve your cake decorating techniques. Divided into four sections which cover cake basics, fondant, buttercream and chocolate, and with colour photography throughout, this is a helpful baker's bible to keep in your kitchen and refer to in moments of uncertainty.

Nov 13

We knew this was going to be a fabulous book after the well-detailed projects that Carol compiles for us each month, and we are not disappointed! It contains tips, techniques and trade secrets and is perfect for a beginner, but even more experienced cake decorators will find super tips they may not have been aware of previously.

Carol Deacon has been decorating and making cakes since 1990 when an old school friend innocently asked her if she could make a birthday cake. Since that first fateful request, Carol has written 11 books, Compendium of Cake Decorating will be number 12! Carol worked for a while at Jane Asher's cake shop in London and has also acted as a cake consultant for a supermarket chain. She has demonstrated her art at all sorts of venues including international cake shows, on television and even once on a cross channel ferry! Carol has also contributed many features for various cake and food magazines both in the UK and abroad.