Baking your own birthday cake

[Lonoxo]

When I was growing up, our cakes came from the supermarket. I would like to make my DD’s birthday cake but not sure how to go about it. I have a bit of baking experience but fairy cakes and cakes for tea (in bread tin) I have a food mixer. I’ve never made a round cake before. I look at all these cakes with elaborate decorations and would like to achieve that one day. Any tips on how I should approach this?

The cakes with elaborate decorations will have likely been baked by experienced or professional bakers and can be pretty complex to achieve.

Depending on when your DDs birthday is, what sort of cake you'd be happy to present and how much you're willing to practise will dictate how stressful a task this will be. A lovely two tier Victoria sandwich, carrot or chocolate cake with filling and a little icing on top will be easy to master but a fully frosted, smooth, professional looking affair is going to take a lot of practise.

If you haven't dabbled a huge amount in cake baking then I think you should start with just experimenting with baking different cakes and making different fillings- buttercream, ganache, cream cheese frosting. Build your repertoire and experience a little in making different cakes. They will look homely but taste delicious.

If you're wanting to move towards the more professional looking cakes then a class might be a good idea. As they're probably not running currently you can find loads of YouTube videos on cake decorating which can give you tips and ideas of how to achieve certain processes.

Good luck and hope the cake turns out well :)

Trashkitten is right , if you want to achieve that slick professional look a class is a good idea . However , if you just want a nice looking homemade cake you can do that quite easily . The easiest cake to make is an all in sponge you can put in your mixer . For decoration I’ve always gone simple and covered the cake in butter icing and then covered the butter icing in sweets or chocolate buttons . I’ve done things like writing the number in white buttons and the rest of the cake in milk chocolate buttons . I bought a cheap book on children’s cakes years ago and that has given me other ideas too so in your position I’d look for a book and start from there . A homemade cake always tastes better.

The easiest, most professional birthday cake I can think of is 2 x Victoria sponge cakes (7 or 8 inch, practice ahead of time) with jam in the middle and cover with buttercream on sides and top. Then put chocolate fingers all the way round the outside and tie with ribbon.

Top with fruit eg. strawberries, blueberries, raspberries when about to serve. Looks amazing and your icing skills are not on show

You can buy personalised cake toppers on Ebay quite cheap. Flat ones or high ones. So all you have to do is ice the cake. To make your icing on tge cake smooth, cut a rectangle from a plastic lid from a take away , margarine, carton. It doubles as a scraper and a smoother.

Thanks all. Great tips here, I will check them out.