Other Baking Accessories and Cake Decorating

Other Baking Accessories and Cake Decorating

When you wish to bake a cake, whipping up the batter, pouring it in a pan, and putting it in the oven is the easiest of your tasks. After the cake layers have been baked and cooled off, they need to assembled, layered with icing, and decorated. Fortunately, there are baking and decorating supplies that will help make your task easier and more fun.

Available cake decorating supplies are

• Disposable piping bags are filled with frosting or buttercream and fitted with tips. They can also be washable and made of silicone or cotton.
• Piping gun.
• Alphabet and number decorating molds allow the baker to safely place words, names, or numbers on the cake.
• Icing tips or nozzles are used with pastry bags to make a variety of shapes. These include flowers, dots, leaves, ruffles, straight lines, wavy lines, and stars.
• Couplers, which attach to nozzles and pastry bags.
• Decorating kits can come with offset spatulas, plungers, edge scrapers, tops, and other items.
• Wafer paper.

Supplies you can eat include

• Icing mix.
• Food coloring, including edible paint and coloring from markers.
• Edible glitter in many colors. Some types of glitter are based on gum arabic.
• Sprinkles and jimmies in many colors.
• Ready-made fondants: This is a type of icing that is poured or pressed on, and has a very smooth finish.
• Edible, spray-on glaze.
• Flavoring oils that include peppermint oil, orange oil, cream cheese, strawberry, and anise.
• Candy melts.
• Meringue powder, which gives a bit of volume to boiled icing. You can use meringue powder instead of egg white in some frosting.

There are a multitude of accessories from which you can choose. They include

• Nonstick molds, including the "snake" types that allow you to bake your cake in just about any shape.
• Shortening.
• Glycerin to loosen frosting that may have hardened.
• Tylose powder, which is a substitute for gum paste in fondant.
• Cupcake rings.
• Cupcake wrappers.
• Paramount crystals, which help chocolate to melt smoothly.
• Mini tartlet molds.
• Round and square cake dummies. These dummies are made of foam but are covered with buttercream or royal icing.
• Transfer sheets. These sheets have sayings or greetings on them, sometimes in white chocolate.

If you want to make gifts of your baking products, do not forget about cake boxes. They come with and without windows.