World of Cakes part 1

Welcome to the World of Cake Baking!!

I will admit that this post is mainly tied for a grade while I’m taking classes for my culinary degree. I have dabbled in baking LONG before I have ever thought of taking classes. I still remember trying to make my dad a birthday cake that was suppose to look like Jeff Gordon’s NASCAR race car. I had it all planned out. I was going to make a chocolate cake and form it into a car shape and put fondant over it. I thought it would be simple enough, but this was before fondant was premade and accessible at any store. Delulu was my middle name back then. All I will say about the car cake was that I would have won the prize on Netflix’s show, Nailed it!. It was the thought that counts.

You often hear people say that baking is science rather than art. While the statement is true but it is severely an understatement. Most times, people think that cooking and baking go hand-in-hand. Dinner and desert is the perfect combination. But there is a reason why some chefs decide to become cooks while others go into pastry.

Spending the Spring 2026 semester in Introduction to Cakes has been an experience. We have made basic cakes such as cakes that air as a leavener and chemical leaveners. We also had projects like we, as a class, had to bake and decorate cakes, cake pops and cupcakes for an anniversary event for our Music Department. Throughout this, I will go more into details of what type of cakes I have made and what I have learned from them. I will also talk about other things related to the topic of cakes such as frosting as well.

Chiffon Cake

A little information about Chiffon Cakes. Chiffon cake is made by whipping the egg whites and then folding them into the cake batter. It’s closely related to Angel Food cake, but the only difference is that Chiffon cakes use the egg yolks in a different part of the cake batter as well as folding in the egg whites. The Angel Food cake strictly uses egg whites.

This cake was one of best cakes I have made. It had turned out so well and I was proud of it. Going into this lab, I had the basic understanding of folding in the whipped egg whites into the batter. I had done an Angel Food cake as part of a different course. This cake was super soft and had a very nice coloring. I had topped the slice of cake with a Raspberry Orange sauce and whipped cream. This will be something that I will make more often.

Frosting

The first things that we learned about in this course was frosting. Frosting is literally “the icing on the cake.” Frosting is much thicker cousin of icing. Frosting, in its simplest form, is powdered sugar and water. I know that there are different ways to make frosting, but just for today, I will be talking about American Buttercream.

American Buttercream is made by whipping unsalted butter until pale in color and has doubled in size. Then you add powdered sugar and a splash of a liquid of choice, whether it be milk, cream or even water would work fine. The best thing that I have figured out is that the ratio for a decent buttercream is 2:1 sugar to butter. I’m sure that this isn’t a new thing but when you are trying to scale a recipe so that you are not wasting ingredients, it matters. Anyways… I wanted to use a half pound of butter, or 2 sticks, instead of a full pound. Most recipes called for 2 pounds of powdered sugar for 1 pound of butter. Cut the butter by half as well as the sugar. BAM!! Add splashes of heavy cream as needed and I had a smaller batch of buttercream.

We did have a lab day where we had the option to use butter or shortening. This lab was mainly to learn and practice piping techniques. I opted for shortening since it would save some money plus, I wasn’t planning on eating it afterwards. While you can use the same ratio as I had mentioned above and switch butter for shortening, the taste and texture will not be the same. Prior to this course, I had worked in a grocery store deli/bakery combo and had taken an 8 hour certification class on how to decorate cakes. By no means am I an expert at decorating cakes. I had the basic understanding of how to decorate those simple, standard store cakes. I just had a better idea of what I was doing.