Bullock-Prado Gesine - Fantastical Cakes: Incredible Creations for the Baker in Anyone

When I was a kid visiting my aunts house in Maryland in the 80s, I battled with my big sister over possession of the single greatest tome ever written in all of these great United States: Cake Decorating! If I could get my grubby little hands on it first, I spent every minute engrossed in that puny book, a pamphlet, really, dedicated to piping spastic ruffles and neon flowers on lumpy box cakes. Cake Decorating! promised that with only a few specialty tips and a relatively steady hand, you, too, could make delightfully decorated treats. It was exactly the kind of book that my own baking snob mother would never allow in her kitchen, a book that celebrated wicked things like excessive sugar!

Preservative-packed boxed cake mixes! Artificial dyes! Cakes in the shape of stuffed toys!

Looking at it again, so many years later (I found myself a well-loved copy on eBay), Im astounded not only by how damn ghastly the cakes inside looked (it was pre-Instagram, after all), but that it never occurred to me how odd it was that the book didnt contain a single real recipe. Instead, listed in the tools section, the author(s) recommended which flavor of box mix and canned frosting worked best with each style of cake. From scraggly, demon-possessed-looking teddy bears whose eyes have been applied in a haphazard manner, to square blocks of cake piped with jittery numbers to approximations of recalled childrens toys, to cakes with waxy white icing tinted in an array of colors never to be found in nature, I did not see a single decorating idea or finished cake in the book that didnt look to be a permanent resident of the Island of the Misfit Cakes. Although not a single confection in that book is remotely appetizing, the magic, the promise of learning to make a cake truly spectacular still beckons to me from within those pages.

Since I grew up to become the pastry chef and baking instructor that I was clearly genetically engineered to be (what ten-year-old spends five hours meticulously reading over a twenty-page book dedicated to piping squiggly lines and lopsided flowers?), Ive been looking for the modern version of that little book, one that combined some of the whimsy and clever ideas (make grass and animal fur with the same piping tip!) of Cake Decorating! with the added culinary backbone, skills, and elegant recipes you might find in a Julia Child tome or a professional pastry text. I always came up empty-handed.

I wrote the book I was yearning for with my students in mind every step of the way. In my little baking school, Sugar Glider Kitchen, I bring together all kinds of bakers, from rank beginners who cant tell a yolk from a white to experienced chefs who need a refresher on croissant. No matter the skill level, every baker that walks through my door wants to walk out with something beautiful in his or her hands because baking is as much a visual experience as it is a treat for the taste buds. Cake carries this burden to the extreme. Its gotta be gorgeous, otherwise you cant Instagram it. And if you dont Instagram it, it doesnt really exist. But joking aside, we eat with our eyes first and a beautiful cake relays important information: (1) that the baker gives a damn; (2) the baker knows what he or she is doing; and (3) if its half as tasty as it is pretty, its going to be the best cake ever.

So, when a student asked in a class whether I was writing another book and I answered, Yup. Its going to focus on creating and decorating beautiful cakes, all the members of the class looked up in unison, their butter and flour-encrusted hands motionless, hovering over their unfinished quick puff.

Did you say cakes? And decorating? A whole book? someone asked from the back of the classroom.

Well, thats the plan, I said. There was a silence and then an explosion of glee.

Yes! Yes yes yes! Im not exaggerating. That was the response. Along with a few Thank Gods.

Turns out that while Ive been teaching my students insanely complicated pastry techniques that I insist they need in their repertoire, Ive also been listening to them and what they really want to get out of their baking life. Sometimes they do want a big challenge, a multistep extravaganza. Most of the time, however, they want to keep their baking projects simple and manageable. Heres the rub, though. They also want their baked goods to be super scrumptious and to look gorgeous. In chatting with my students, theyve expressed time and again that they want fewer and less complicated steps, but they still want the wow factor. And if there are a few steps involved, they want them simple and fail-safethey want to know what they can make ahead, what can be kept frozen, and when they can skip a step without ruining everything. These are my Cake Decorating! soul brothers and sisters. Its for them, for you, for all of us, that Ive written this book.

What Im best known for, what my students travel across the country to learn, are the baking techniques and decorating tips and tricks that straddle the worlds of fine pastry art and down-home baking. Specifically, Im asked to teach bakers the skills to make cakes look professional and elegant, that taste amazing, but that dont require days on end to finish. Heres the thing, I developed these fast and efficient approaches for me. Its actually a selfish motivation because Ive made and I make a lot of cakes and I want every single one of them to look gorgeous and tasty but I want gorgeous without too much fuss.

Ive also created a method to get great results every time. Some steps might seem like overkill at first, but once you get into the routine of it and see the results, the steps will move quickly, and youll come to realize that things like prepping pans and getting ingredients to room temperature are as important to the recipe as measuring out the flour correctly. So, Id like to introduce you to the B.A.D.A.S.S. method of making cakes: Bake Ahead, Dam and Assemble, Smooth Coat, and Spruce Up. This is information you can take into your general cake life, and I know you live a very full cake-filled existence, so these techniques you can use on every cake, not just the cakes in this book. Each step ensures success: