My experience in trying new decorating techniques for desserts
I love baking so over this pandemic I have decided to try new ways of decorating the desserts I make.
I have decided to work on my decorating for a few reasons first, I have a school project to do and because I have more time being stuck at home during the pandemic. I have been baking for some years and I like watching shows/videos on baking as well. Even though, I have been baking for a few years I am definitely not an expert I just like to do it for fun and to have some good desserts to eat.
The first thing I tried my hand at was decorating a cake with fondant. My mom’s friend wanted a cake made for someone’s birthday. For the cake, she wanted a garden on the cake with a fence around the cake sides. My skills for frosting couldn’t do all of that plus I hadn’t tried fondant in that way. So this was a new experience to do! For the garden, we had to create vegetables with fondant to go on top of the cake. We made colored fondant many colors for all the vegetables such as corn, carrots, tomatoes, eggplants, and cabbage. My mom and sister helped out with the decorating by making all of the vegetables. We made so many vegetables. They had the right shapes for the vegetables. It was quite hard making them though, as they were small and the fondant dried kind of fast. Faster than frosting that was for sure! But the hardest part was rolling out a big piece of fondant to go over the whole cake. It was easy to roll it out it was just getting it on the cake properly. Fixing the small rips that happened while getting it onto the cake was challenging. I would do this again but maybe with a little more practice with fondant first.
Then the next thing I tried my hand at was decorating the crust of a pie. Because it was close to Thanksgiving. We bought pie crust and filling pre-made. So I didn’t really need to make anything it was more of decorating. There are multiple ways to decorate a pie you can cut out patterns, make the small slits in the middle, only do the edge of the crust, you can use crumbs, and lattice. I decided for this apple pie to cut out shapes. Then place them over each other on the pie. I cut out big ones, small ones, and ones with holes in the middle. This was probably the easiest decorating to do because I just had to cut out shapes and place them on top of the filling and edges. I would have totally done this one again but maybe with a different shape to cut out.
The last thing I am going to be talking about is cookies. I had no cookie mix or stuff to make the cookies that I wanted for this type of cookie decoration. I decided to use cake mix to make the cookies. I used red velvet for the cookies and for this decoration I wanted to pipe out the cookie dough into a swirl to bake. Afterward, I wanted to add something more, I decided since I have chocolate and chocolate frosting. Use that as some more decoration. Some of the cookies got chocolate-dipped bottoms and the others got chocolate frosted.
Overall I have tried different ways to decorate. They were all fun and tasty to eat. Some were easier than others but I just have to practice and learn.