How To Make The Best Cake Designs

Let me start by conceding that the cake designs you and I knew when we were kids are now pretty much antiquated or even obsolete—displaced by the cake designs of modernity. When I was a kid, for instance, my grandmother would spend a full day on one of the cake designs she worked alone, by hand, and to exhaustive degrees. She made hand crafted frosting roses, folding the layers of petals against each other to create remarkable and delicious three dimensional delights that adorned her cakes. She also hand-tubed the cakes, covering where icing would be on a plain, undecorated cake, with thousands of piped stars. For example, she made a cake that looked like a newborn baby’s sleeping coat. When she finished squeezing stars to cover every inch, the cake looked more like a real hand-knit sweater!

The wedding cakes that she and others who specialized in cake designs completed were also unique, time-consuming works of art that today seem simple and plain, though, next to the cake designs of the classic and most luxurious cake decorators. I have seen or tasted (or both) some of the most unusual kinds of cakes. The one with a full sheet of icing wrapped around it as if the icing were material of cloth is the one that still impresses me. Then there are the cake designs that always remind me of good old Martha (as in Stewart): they are graced by falls of flowers that have been dipped in egg white and rolled in sugar, making them not only beautiful (sparkly) to look at but edible.

The special occasion cake designs, or those intended for the well-to-do host are so rich and redolent that I am afraid describing them will make me drop everything right now and run out and search for one here in this fairly well-to-do town. If you saw the episode of Sex in the City where Miranda Hobbes is substituting chocolate for sex, you know what cake designs I am referring to. Some had chocolate shaped like clay sculptures, some had chocolate wrapped around and about them, and others were just psychotic kinds and amounts of chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. When Miranda, who has found chocolate éclairs, feels buying seven éclairs at once too embarrassing, she decides on a cake; asks what the man recommends; and agrees to a designer thing that you can see she is already beginning to salivate over. But the price, $74.50, as she says, “…as in seventy-four dollars and fifty cents?” is way too out there even for her.

These are the cakes I think of as the cake designs that have replaced our grandmothers’: they are the glazed, gold-leafed (I am NOT kidding—real gold), or realistic icing photo embedded cake designs you see on TV on the talk shows or at special celebrity occasions. They are the cake designs you find in classic movies and shows featuring upscale characters or down-scale characters out of place in upscale shops. They are the cake designs, if you are lucky or gifted, that you can see, taste, or make yourself…maybe once in a new and modern lifetime.