Wednesday Review: Wedding Cake Art and Design: A Professional Approach

To continue with the wedding theme this week, I am reviewing Wedding Cake Art and Design: A Professional Approach by Toba Garrett. Like the subtitle says, Garrett focuses a lot of the book's content on the professional cake designer: the steps to take when working with a client, how to write up a contract etc.

What I like:

·         Chapter 1: Designing the Cake lays a great foundation of cake knowledge. It covers color, texture, theme, shape, and décor.

·         Chapters 2-11 showcase different theme ideas like romantic, textured, seasonal, and floral designs.

·         Each chapter opens up with a hypothetical couple - a little background on who they are, what kind of cake theme and taste they're looking for and how the cake designer developed that into 2-3 sketches. Then Garrett shows you how to make each of the cakes.

·         SO MANY RECIPES. TWELVE different kinds of cake! They all sound delicious. There are also recipes for marzipan, gum paste, a ton of buttercreams, royal icing, ganache, pastillage (I don't even know what this is), curd, and jam! oh my gosh I am really hungry all of a sudden.

·         At the end of the recipe chapter it tells you the best pairings of cake, filling, icing, and fondant.

·         Also includes templates you can xerox.

What I don't like:

·         All the cakes use Fondant. Granted, it's not the only thing they use. As I said before there are about a bajillion different icing recipes in the back of the book. And frequently multiple kinds are used in the decorations, but it'd be nice to see a cake without fondant as well.

·         Chapter 12 is all about setting up a cake design business. Whether it's best to work from home or rent office space, what equipment you will need to buy, what you need to do legally to establish a business, how to network. Etc. Not very useful for me.

I think my favorite part of this book is the recipes. I need to see if I can make modified versions of the cakes because obviously I won't need a whole wedding cake (unless somebody wants me to make theirs??) I think I'll try one for a holiday or birthday coming up soon. There was a really cool fall looking one so maybe for Thanksgiving!