So I'm on a very short cake lull at the minute and although I do have some posts I could do of previous cakes I got very excited about a new purchase over the weekend.
For those who don't bake cakes you might not be aware just how much cake equipment there is out there - and if I'm honest I would love it all! But it all comes at a price so slowly I am filling up a cupboard in my kitchen with cake equipment. When I first started baking more seriously I often stood in the aisles of Hobbycraft or my local Cake Craft Store thinking... what the hell does that contraption do?! So here is what I have accumulated over the past year. My tools of the trade.
In front of my lovely KitchenAid what I love are the very basic tools. On the left are my smoothers, flat edged and round edged. In my next post I'll show these in practice smoothing all the lumps and bumps from sugarpaste when it's been popped onto your cake. In the middle is my cake leveller. You can't see in this pic but there is a thin wire that you can move up and down and slices through your cake to create the levels which you sandwich with jam and buttercream yum! Before I had this is was a wobbly knife jobby, with my leveller cutting cakes is a breeze. Also my small spatula for slathering buttercream onto cakes to create a nice smooth base for the sugarpaste. I could do with more sizes of this but equipment don't come cheap. Next the two white strips are 'marzipan spacers' - these come in handy to roll sugarpaste out to an even thickness all over if you have one on each side of your sugarpaste and roll your rolling pin across the spacers to get no lumps and bumps. Great little tools! On the right we have a superlong PVC rolling pin which is non-stick so loves sugarpaste and doesn't need to be cornfloured/icing sugared to use. Sugarpaste life saver.
This is what most of the clutter looks like in my cupboard! Cutters of all shapes and sizes, alphabet cutters (I have two sets with different fonts). Also a piping bag for buttercream and a few tips I've collected including one for a grass effect! Then I've got snowflake and butterfly cutters with plungers, florist tape (for tying together the wires of individually made modelling paste flowers), and an impression mat for rolling texture into your sugarpaste.
And this is my steadily growing colour collection. Wilton's gel colours are by far the best I have used - only a tiny dot will get you a lovely strong colour. I've got an artists palette for painting onto cakes because gel colour + vodka = cake paint! And an assortment of brushes. Theres edible glitters, icing strengthening gum tragacanth (still can't pronounce that) and edible glues!
The pieces of equipment that I lust after most are modelling tools. These are normally packaged individually and can cost around £6 a pop. I bought a cutting wheel in the early days and a straight line cutter which I promptly lost so when I saw a whole set of modelling tools for £6.99 in steamer trading company I had to have them! And when I got home I couldn't wait to play with them. These will come in so handy for decorating cakes or making my own little models. There's a shell effect, star effects, dotted line cutter and so on. also some round tipped tools on the far right which will come in so handy for manipulating small pieces of sugarpaste when my podgy fingers are too big and warm for the job. So here are some pictures of my play time with my new tools!
So ladies and gents.... if you ever want to know what to get me for Christmas or birthdays........ Cake tools!
Love
Kirsty xxx
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