Much advice on how to frost a cake

Is there something about May that makes us want to frost a cake? Because both Cooking Light and Martha Stewart Living featured a page of how-tos in their May issues.

You can view Martha's how-to lesson online. The one tip they fail to mention at Martha Stewart (though Cooking Light does give it) is to lightly mist the cake with water after applying the final coat. (You may want to do this after you set the cake in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.) Using a small water bottle, mist the cake, then use a clean spatula to smooth out any bumps.

Over at About.com, Carroll Pellagrinelli advises gently rubbing the surface smooth with parchment paper and your hands after the cake has set for an hour. I'm not sure how smart this is as most frostings develop a crust. I could see the smoothing introducing lots of cracks and bumps into your cake. I've seen this advice use elsewhere as a way to introduce a pattern into your frosting - you use textured papertowels.

There are some great frosting and filling tips over at baking911.com covering everything from crumb coats to storing a frosted cake, too. It's a very comprehensive site, one that I'll be consulting from now on.

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed.