Pipe Dreams: Wilton #5 on a Not Red, But Velvet, Cake with STrawberry Cream Cheese Frosting
I See What I Did There
Now that cookie season is gone, I can get back to cakes with joyful exuberance!
With gleeful abandon?
With trepidatious enthusiasm?
Regardless, one of my goals for this year is to explore the world of tips and flavors. As part of this adventure I am now the proud owner of Wilton’s 55-piece cake decorating kit, a packet of ceramics tools, and a bevy of cake combs.
If you’ve never seen what talented people can do with these tools, stop reading this amateur hour and run, don’t walk, to Instagram or TikTok to marvel at the incredible talents of people like @chef.moly, @ohcakeswinnie, @thepinkcooker, @frostedhag or just search the tag Cakestagram. It’s really incredible what people can do with these tips and tools.
Some people would say these look too good to eat, but I’ve never had that problem. I want to eat the world.
Where to Begin?
The obvious question to ask when confronted with the sheer AUDACITY of the talent on display on Instagram is “Where does one begin?”
Well I’d like to tell you there’s a rhyme and reason for what I have planned, but for now I don’t even know enough to know what I don’t know. You know?
Wilton #5 - Round
As far as I can tell, there are somewhere between 15 and 20 Wilton round decorating tips. This number varies because the availability of the tips fluctuates depending on which website or informational poster you’re looking at. Even the Wilton site itself is a bit confusing on this point.
My kit has eleven round tips and I picked #5 because it wasn’t too small or too big. I had a vision of decorating my Not Red, but Velvet Cake with a complex pattern of lines. I imagined smooth pipes laid close to each other in complex, non-Euclidean patterns. It would be a cake so subtly perverse that staring into it would open the doors of perception. A cake you could feel with your eyes and taste with the tips of your fingers.
A cake that questioned the sanity of all who beheld it.
In hindsight, it was probably unrealistic for me to make a cake that tears open reality on my first try, but you know what they say, “Shoot for the stars, even if you miss you’ll endlessly accelerate through the emptiness of space until you’re caught in the yearning tendrils of the event horizon you were always destined to find.”
The cake went… well… see for yourself:
Lessons with #5
That is an extreme close-up.
Consistency
The picture makes the piping look like ketchup, but I am here to tell you this cake straight-up looks like I covered it in factory-reject Twizzler Pull-and-Peels. The piping was actually just a simple icing of powdered sugar, melted butter, and water. This is the kind of icing typically used for writing and it sets hard and shiny.
Although I think my choice of icing was correct, I’m not sure piping on cream cheese frosting was the best choice since the frosting itself was still somewhat slack.
Cream cheese frosting never gets too hard, even after chilling, and I’m sure that a firmer, colder cake would have helped the piping grab onto the sides easier. If I had done a buttercream it would have been easier, but buttercream on a velvet cake, especially American buttercream, well… that’s a topic for another time.
A Vertical Surface
The hardest part of laying the pipe was painting on the cake’s vertical surface. The picture above shows the two main results of not knowing how to pipe vertically: smushing and drooping.
Smushing = pressing the tip too hard into the cake and creating a wavering or flat line (look at the wavering line closest to the rim of the cake)
Drooping = holding the tip too far from the cake and causing the pipe to fall too much before it catches (see the thick gloops in the upper-right of the photo)
It was relatively easy to pipe in strictly vertical lines. Vertical lines allowed the piping to catch even if I was too far from the cake. I see why these round tips are great for things like drooping archs or piping an outline on a cookie, since the icing wanted to “fall” the entire time I was piping.
Air Bubbles
This feels like an obvious one, but man do I need to get all the air bubbles out before I pipe.
You can see two small air bubbles in the third line from the lip of the cake, but the more insidious air bubbles break the piping and cause big globs where the lines have to be restarted. You can see one of these globular beauties at the end of the wavery mustache-like line on the top of the cake.
These globs are unsightly in this design, but if I were piping a draped arch and an air bubble broke the line, it would basically ruin the cake, and by the transitive property, my life.
Maybe Next Time…
You can see from the photo above that maybe all the blame wasn’t to be laid on the vertical surface: I’ve got fudge fingers.
I’m going to keep practicing, but I’m not expecting a steady hand and pristine finish to EVER be my goal.
My goal is to keep challenging myself and show things that I know I’m bad at. There’s something really freeing about approaching something with no expectations of success. It’s like being a little kid again. It’s nice to pick up a new tool and just play around. When I look at this cake and remind myself I can count the number of times I’ve used a decorating tip on one hand, it makes me feel proud.
The eyes forgive any sins of negligence, too. Look at them. Those eyes just want you to be happy.
The eyes are the windows to the souls of my cakes, and these eyes say “I’m ridiculous, right? But next time you’ll be better. And the time after that you’ll probably be worse because you’re going to get cocky and try something even harder. And the time after that you’ll be even better, even if you don’t realize it. Why am I starting all these sentences with conjunctions? This is writing, not speaking. Oh, forget it, just eat me.”
Not Red, But Velvet, Cake with Strawberry Cream Cheese Frosting
I didn’t grow up with red velvet cake, so I don’t have a huge appreciation for the toxic red color, which, if you’ve never made a red velvet cake, is literally just at least a tablespoon of red coloring added to a lightly chocolate cake softened with vinegar or buttermilk.
I love a processed food, but for some reason, dyes taste like poison to me. They taste like the off-gassing cheap furniture exudes into a room. As someone who can eat an entire can of frosting without feeling sick, it’s interesting that my genetics actually tip me off to too much dye. Choices, ancestors. Choices.
So for this Not Red, but Velvet, Cake takes the velvety light texture of the Red Velvet classic, removes the food dye, and adds on top of it a flavored cream cheese frosting. If you haven’t added flavor to a cream cheese frosting before, get ready to be blown away. It’s incredible.
Cake: Red Velvet Cake from Zoe Bakes Cakes less the food coloring. You don’t need it!
Cream Cheese Frosting: Also from Zoe Bakes Cakes. I added two teaspoons of Strawberry Emulsion to the frosting, which was a lot. If you have a softer palette, start with one teaspoon. If you can eat a can of cherry pie filling and want more, try two.
Icing:
Melt two tablespoons butter and let it cool slightly
Add 170 grams powdered sugar (1.75 cups) and 1 tablespoon water
Add water a little (<1 teaspoon) at a time until you get the desired consistency
Pour into icing bag fitted with #5 Wilton Round Tip
Hang onto your hat
Swear a bunch as you get a cramp in your wrist
Throw the bag in the sink and storm off
Leave for 10-15 minutes to set(tle down)
Come back and appreciate the effort
Chuckle to yourself
Squirt remaining icing into your mouth
Really suck the rest of it out of the bag, you’ve earned it
