The Right Way to Ice a Cake
No one wants to go through all the trouble of baking a cake only to muck up the frosting. Here, Saveur associate editor Ben Mims—who grew up in a family of skilled home bakers—shows us a foolproof way to gorgeously ice a cake.
Before Mims does anything else, he places strips of parchment paper on a cake stand. (It catches drippy excess frosting, and is a cinch to remove by running a paring knife between it and the cake.)
And now about that frosting: Mims’s method allows bakers to skip the crumb coat, the thin layer of icing that seals in crumbs, which saves both time and energy.
Instead, Mims plops the bulk of the frosting on top of a totally bare cake, smoothing it out while revolving the cake stand. He then pushes icing over the side of the cake. Because there’s so much frosting to work with, you don’t have to worry about pesky crumbs ruining the icing’s smooth surface.
Check it out, learn something new, and be done with crumb coats forever.
