Cake Decorating - The Wedding Cake

 Nearly every social event offers food in the celebration, birthdays, anniversaries, and weddings, are but a few of the events where food is an important part of the celebration. This article is about the wedding cake. A wedding is a way to celebrate the union of two people who are starting a life together. People come to eat and drink and a great deal of work is put into the preparation for this day. The wedding cake is often the focal point of the event. There are times that it is considered bad luck not to have a piece of the wedding cake.
                          

There are specified rules for cutting the wedding cake that are a part of tradition. For instance, at a wedding reception, it is traditional to cut the wedding cake just before dessert is served, if the wedding reception takes place during lunch or the dinner hour. However, if the reception is held during tea or cocktails, the cake is cut just after all of the guests arrive. It is tradition for the bride and groom to cut and eat the first slice together, as a symbol of their choice to be together. The rest of the cake is sliced by the maid of honor or a family member.
                                                          

 The wedding reception is the most anticipated part of the wedding. And everyone looks forward to seeing the cake cut and sharing it with the bride and groom as a symbol of good will and a hope, that as a couple, the bride and groom will be prosperous and fertile.

If you would like to become a cake decorator, there are several ways you can go about it. There are hundreds of books out there that will teach you how to decorate cakes, from the simple to the ornate. Another way to learn cake decorating, is to purchase one of the many videos or DVD's that will take you, step-by-step , through the cake decorating process.

The best way to learn cake decorating is to take a class. While DVD's, videos, and books are highly popular and informative, taking a class will help you move along faster. You will be able to get immediate feedback from the teacher, and they can see where you might be going wrong and correct you before the project is ruined.

Some wedding cakes offer a different flavor for each layer. White icing, while still ordered, has made way for a wider selection of frostings. Chocolate, mocha, lemon, and any other flavor you can imagine are used for wedding cake decorating. It is possible to customize your cake using all of your favorite flavors. How the wedding cake is decorated is a personal choice as well. You can have just about anything you can dream up put on a wedding cake including, fruit and even real edible flowers.

                         

Choosing a wedding cake is quite a task. Tradition calls for a white cake with white frosting for weddings. In this day and age, couples are choosing their favorite flavor. This has bakeries and cake decorators striving to offer a larger selection of cakes. Chocolate, fruit, yellow, pound, and marble are some of the cakes made for modern weddings.

Cake Decorating Clubs

 

 There is a magic about a beautifully decorated cake at a gathering. Whether it is a birthday cake or a 4 tier wedding cake. A work of art in confection is the centerpiece of any special occasion. While it is a long haul from spreading canned frosting on a sheet cake, to creating a work of art that will stop the show, it is a fun and rewarding experience to travel the road.

There are mentors that can help you to discover the beauty of buttercream, since the new resurgence of interest in cake decorating. There are several cake decorating clubs. One of the oldest cake decorating clubs, The Fremont Frosters, to one of the newest , The Contra Costa Cake and Sugar Society.

The 40 year-old Frosters, have members from Santa Clara to San Leandro, California, share years of experience, tips, and tricks with other members of the club. They gather once a month, they have a website, and a quarterly newsletter called Sweet Graffiti, that is filled with seasonal cake decorating ideas and pictures. Each month a member gives a presentation on cake decorating at the meeting. They find that all levels of cake decorators will learn something from each demonstration.

Once most of the members see how a design or decoration is made, by breaking down the process, they see how simple it is to learn the different artistic techniques. It is easy to see it wasn't a big mystery after all and can be learned with practice.

Cake decorating classes are more popular than ever. Craft stores are filled with information about classes, and tools for cake decorating. If you are not careful you can spend a great deal of money on tools to help with cake decorating. Starting out, you don't need to have everything you can get your hands on when it comes to Cake decorating.

All the beginning cake decorator needs are tips to make leaves, borders, and swags, disposable icing bags, and couplings to attach the tips. An icing rule for smoothing the top of a cake is helpful, a paint edger from the local hardware store will work for this.

There were many more cake decorating clubs in the 1960's when women spent more time in the home, and were able to take up the art of cake baking and decorating. As time went by and most of the women began taking jobs, most of them were disbanded.

Many women are watching new cable TV food shows that are enticing home bakers back into cake decorating and learning European techniques such as using rolled fondant. The interest in cake decorating is huge and growing bigger every day. Enrollment in Wilton cake decorating classes have grown over the past few years.

Many people think cake decorating is easy, because the TV pros, who have been cake decorating for 30 years, make it look that way. They don't understand that it will take a good deal of practice to be able to get the same result as the pros do.