Ace of Cakes

There are a lot of good decorators in the world. Famous on their own right. One of my favorites is Duff Goldman. He's a badass decorator-- lights, digital frames, rotating parts, fireworks! He does them all. Besides his own reality tv show, he also has his own line of decorating stuff and book (thanks, Joe!). They also have Cakes for Two (actually for 15!).


The best thing about him (and his show), is that as a decorator, we can relate to his "issues". One example was when he had to do horizontal designs on a cake and he's been wondering how to hide the ends of each line! I've always wondered about those and guess what, he doesn't know either. So, do you know what he did? He called up Collete Peters (another institutional name!) and asked what to do with that bit. Surprisingly, Ms. Peters told him there's gonna be that annoying imperfection and just put it on the back! How cool is that! Photographic sides are the norm! :)

You know how we prefer not to do mini cakes? His crew doesn't like doing them too! It's soooo difficult to make them! Regardless of the size, the effort to do one regular 8" cake is the same as doing a 3" cake.

Ace of Cakes makes me feel assured that we are doing things right! Too bad, they're ending the series. They are, however, opening an East Coast branch (yey for them)!

Charm City Cakes
http://www.charmcitycakes.com/

Icing Colors

When we were starting to decorate cakes, we use Wilton Gel to color fondant and gumpaste. The gel containers come in 1/2 ounce and 1 ounce. It was great and they even teach you how to mix up colors.



However, one issue we had is that our resulting cakes are pastel-y. Unfortunately, this is not always desirable. Granted that it may be because we didn't use enough gel, it was a bit difficult to use different sticks every single time to avoid contamination. We tried using Chefmaster, too, with the same results.





Finally, Americolor came into the picture. With it's fliptop bottles, we found it so much easier to use than the bottles. Just a little squirt goes a long way!



Since it was easier to color fondant and gumpaste, our cake colors became bolder and deeper. Reds are really red, blacks are really black!



We are sure that Wilton, Chefmaster and Americolor are all good brands but we think Americolor comes out as the winner just by its packaging! :)

We plan to conduct a comparative experiment on all three brands one time! Watch out for that! :)