Professional Cake Decorating

Book excerpt: The comprehensive guide to amazing cake decoration—now fully updated Professional Cake Decorating is a must-have resource for professional and aspiring cake artists, baking and pastry students, and cake decorating hobbyists, drawing on years of experience from master cake designer and IACP Award nominee Toba Garrett. This Second Edition has been completely revamped with gorgeous new photography and a fresh new design. The New Skills have been re-organized into a user-friendly, step-by-step format, and line art and photos throughout the book provide a visual reference for each new technique. The book begins with an introductory chapter on all the fundamentals of the cake designer's art, from covering a cake board to assembling and icing a layered cake to stacking cake tiers with pillars or columns. Subsequent chapters cover decorating techniques including Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced Piping Skills, The Art of Writing and Painting, Royal Icing Design Skills, Hand Modeling Skills, Pastillage Construction, Gumpaste Flowers, and much more. A chapter on Miniature Cakes and Decorated Cookies includes techniques for making petit fours and other small treats, while the Cake and Confectionery Gallery provides inspiration for decorators with nearly 20 full-page photos of breathtaking cakes and information on the techniques needed to complete each one. Garrett also includes recipes for cakes, fillings, icings, cookies, and more, as well as an appendix of templates to help decorators replicate the designs shown in the book.