Hi everybody! My name is Cindy Shepherd. I am a master cake decorator. I have been in business now for many years on my own but I have been decorating now for over 25 years, and I am here today to show you to begin with a few basic tools for starting, working in the field of cake decorating.
Some of you are going to be familiar with. Hopefully you have many of these things right in your own home in kitchen. But others might be new to you so we will show you as we go along.
Obviously, one of the things you will need as a cake decorator is an apron. Believe it or not, icing and cakes are very messy job, so I always keep an apron around.
I also find towels very handy whether I am washing and cleaning things or wiping things dry or whatever. But anyways, see, you have got those at home.
A pair of scissors, I will show you a few uses for them. Obviously you are going to need an icing spatula, something that will scrape out the bowls when you are working or if you are making a cake, you want to scrape out that butter before you put it in to your pans.
Tossing things aside is the easy way for me to know what I have already talked about. Scotch tape, yes, we will be using scotch tape. Tooth picks are great thing for using your food colors and I will talk about food colors on another day.
Skewer, many bakers when they test the cake to tell if it is done, use a tooth pick to test it, I burned my arm once, I use a skewer now, it works much better for me but that is for the skewers is use for.
Air tight containers, whether you use something like these small convenient ones, they work great.
Now, let me show you a few things that you may not have in your home and talk about that. There are many types of cake decorating tips, starting off with some round ones, this is my number three in my left hand, and my right hand is on number 12. As you can see, when the number is smaller, so is the tip and larger, the tip gets larger.
Those round tips are used for writing and for figure piping. Then we have star tamps. The star tamps are used for the stars, your shells and many other techniques. The one in my hand is a number 16 and the one in my right is a 22, they also range in sizes.
We have some other specially tips, these are leaf tips, this is number 67 and this is my favorite a number 349, it is little v shape, works very well.
We also have rose tips, everyone is always interested in making a rose, they become very tiny, I believe this is a 101. 104 is the most commonly used and 124 are even larger.
We have other especially tips, this one is called the basket weave and that is its main purpose, and these are both drop flower tips. As you can see, they come is sizes too.
This little tool is the greatest for helping you to work with cake decorating, you are going to put this in your cake decorating bag and this part fits on the outside with a tip in between. So if you are cake decorating and you are working on -- you are writing a message and all of the sudden, you are ready to some flowers, you want to use the same color if your icing is the proper consistency, you can take out that tip, put on your rose tip and keep working with the same color without happen just stop and change or fill up another bag.
Speaking of bags, you have different ones available to you in the market, this are called feather weight bags. They are light plastic material that work fairly well and last a long time. They are very durable. We also have plastic disposable bags. Sorry, I did have any small ones on hand. These are mine that I use most often and we have parchment triangles.
And if you tune in another video, I will show you how to make a parchment triangle into a nice cone so that you can work with that.
You also will probably want to invest in a few spatulas. This is my favorite one for icing cakes with because of the angle design. While I am working on the cake, I am not going to get my knuckles into the icing because that allows for some extra room, that a straight spatula does not.
This smaller spatula I use for stirring up my colored icing as well as small techniques.
You may want to invest in a very nice, this is my special tool and I have to be careful. I keep it in plastic because it is very sharp and I have cut myself just by touching that blade. This is wonderful tool for trimming off edges and leveling your cakes. Let us put in back in its package.
And another thing that you may not be familiar with, are card board circles. When I am working with the cake, say and eight inch cake, I will use one that is the same size as the cake, this is an eight inch circle, and I will use two to put together for my base and cover it with a nice decorative foil, so that it will look nice once I set my cake on top of it. And I have a nice boarder all the way around.
Speaking of that foil, here is the roll of it. You can use regular aluminum foil as well but this is a nice pretty pattern in it and it is great.
And another thing that you might not happen to have our little paste food colors. This is pink or rose pink which is my favorite pink color. They come in sizes that are half of this which are half ounce and this are one ounce sizes, they last to a very long time, but I use so much that I get mine in larger containers.
An extremely helpful tool with cake decorating is a turn table. I brought this lovely little gem at a place out in Missouri, a walnut factory. But you can find similar ones to this at your local department stores and stuff on a larger scale, normally about 12 to 14 inches round.
Another thing I use frequently is wax paper. For your information, most to all of these things that I have shown you this cake decorating tips, the parchment bags and these food colors can be bought at any cake and candy supplies store.
Let us get started and show you how to do some cake decorating, thank you.
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