Why Create Specialty Cakes?

Specialty cakes can enhance all your celebrations – from birthdays to weddings, graduation parties or showers. Specialty cakes are a guaranteed eye-catcher and will with certainty fascinate your guests.

Specialty Cakes make for a stunning center piece during your party and serve as delicious dessert at the end – all in one.

No birthday is complete without a birthday cake and candles. But you don’t have to be satisfied with a boring sheet cake and just candles on top. Customized specialty cakes come in all shapes and colors. If you can think it the experienced baker or pastry chef can make it. Surprise the soccer fan with a soccer ball specialty cake. You think it will be a flat circle? With modern specialty cake pans even a three dimensional soccer ball specialty cake is possible.

Who said wedding cakes have to be all white? Your specialty wedding cake can be customized to match the color theme of the decorations at the locations of your wedding reception. The several cakes can be stacked on top of each other or displayed separately on a tiered stand. The newest wedding trend are groom’s cakes. Have a specialty cake customized to suit the groom’s interest and taste. How about a specialty cake sculptured as his favorite car?

Furthermore, the cakes of a great specialty cake artist don’t only look fantastic but will also enchant you and your guests with their terrific taste. Specialty cakes come in all kinds of flavors. Aside from the classic vanilla or chocolate cake – how about a mix of both in a marble cake? A recent popular choice is red velvet specialty cake. The vibrant color takes captive the eyes of your guests and its chocolate flavor their taste buds. Do you like carrot cake? A specialty cake can be designed even in this rich and fruity flavor.

Specialty cakes usually have a number of layers. In between all these layers are fillings. Specialty cakes can be filled with one or a variety of flavors, since there are a number of layers to fill. Buttercream fillings in its range of flavors are a classic, as are fruit preserve fillings. Specialty cakes can even be filled with your favorite fruit and whipped cream. And as a contemporary variation your specialty cake can be filled with light mousse fillings in flavors like chocolate or lemon-yogurt.

Cake artists use a variety of materials to create your customized specialty cake. Next to cake and filling in your favorite flavor they work with buttercream, fondant, gumpaste, marzipan, or modeling chocolate. You can use real flowers to decorate your specialty cake but cake artists know how to manipulate sugar dough to create edible sugar flowers that are hard to distinguish from real ones.

Are you convinced yet that your next party or celebration can be brought to a new level with a specialty cake?

Poinsettia Specialty Cake

This is a specialty cake I made for a Christmas banquet last year. Its a red velvet cake with raspberry cream cheese filling. I crumb coated the cake with a thin layer of buttercream and then covered it in white fondant. For the border I made little balls of different shapes in colours matching the theme of the cake.

The poinsettia flower and holly leaves are made from fondant as well. Those who know a bit about sugar flowers will ask why this trouble? Truth is I didn’t know better at the time. I just started out working with sugar doughs and had become comfortable with fondant already.

But I tell you, unless you add some gum powder to your fondant you will make life hard for yourself. You won’t be able to roll out the dough too thinly, it will tear easily, and will take forever to dry, if it will at all.

I myself use Gum-Tex from Wilton, which is a powder that you can just knead into your fondant. You can also use gum tragacanth. They will make the dough more pliable and dry faster.

Then there is gum paste. With the Gum-Tex I bought came a recipe for this and I love it since trying it out first. It’s my number one choice for making sugar flowers now. Gum paste can be rolled out almost paper-thin and you still have freedom to work with it. It makes more beautiful, delicate looking flowers.

Next time I want share with you some of these flowers.