If you're like many home bakers, you prefer to bake holiday, birthday, and other celebratory desserts yourself rather than purchase their counterparts from a local commercial bakery. However, you may also feel that your own efforts don't look nearly as polished and professional as those of people who've made a career out of baking. Fortunately, there are ways you can create gorgeous cakes that showcase your artistic skills and make your special occasion cakes look as good as they taste.
Following are three ways of the many ways you can dress up your cakes.
Make Candied Flowers
Candied flowers were once an important part of Victorian baking tradition, and they still appear from time to time on old-fashioned wedding cakes. Most people, however, associate candied flowers with the kind of fussy, labor-intensive projects that modern cooks and bakers simply don't have time for, but they're actually deceptively easy. All you need to do is brush edible flowers such as violas or nasturtiums with an egg white wash, liberally sprinkle them with sugar, and wait for them to dry. Once dried, they can be used to decorate desserts. This is a particularly fun project for a rainy afternoon for curious children.
Prepare a Ganache
Think of ganache as the grown-up cousin of traditional cake frosting. It hardens on the cake and creates a glaze with a shiny surface. Ganache not only tastes absolutely delicious, but it also makes your cakes look as if you picked them up from the best bakery in town. Ganache is traditionally made from chocolate, sugar, vanilla extract, and milk or cream. Some bakers choose to use different flavors of extract to add depth and interest. You can also make ganache using white chocolate if you don't want your dessert to have the classic chocolate appearance.
Create Unique Sugar Art
Sugar art is a culinary practice that dates all the way back to ancient Egypt. As its name implies, it's the practice of creating decorative sculptures out of sugar. Although creating sugar art takes a great deal of practice and patience, it can be extremely fulfilling to create gorgeous confections in your own kitchen for the purpose of celebrating life's festive moments. The easiest way to get started with sugar art is to learn to create a basic sugar lace that you can use to give your cakes a delicate, ethereal appearance. Once you get used to working with sugar, you can move on to create animals, natures scenes, and other sugar sculptures to provide your desserts with beautiful, custom-made embellishments.
For more information, reach out to a company like Truly Mad Plastics LLC.
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