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We Tried That: Professional cake decorating

 
In her business kitchen in St. Petersburg, Cakes by Carolynn owner Jill Whelan, left, shows Times correspondent Carlynn Crosby how to ice a double layer cake.
In her business kitchen in St. Petersburg, Cakes by Carolynn owner Jill Whelan, left, shows Times correspondent Carlynn Crosby how to ice a double layer cake.
Published March 24, 2017

What we tried: While some kids dream of being astronauts or actors or athletes, I always wanted to be a cake decorator. My mom would park me in front of the Publix bakery, feed me one of their free sprinkled sugar cookies, and let me watch as the bakers piped borders and dropped sugar roses onto large sheet cakes. My favorite memory, or at least the one that stands out the most, involved a Barbie doll and a beach scene, and as I watched the cake decorator meticulously spray terra cotta-colored paint for the sand onto the buttercream, my 4- or 5-year-old self thought: "Barbies, painting and cake. What job could be better?"

The dream came to slight fruition in high school, when I worked at Cold Stone Creamery. There, I learned the basics of cake decorating, like smoothing buttercream with a scraper and writing messages in a pretty cursive font. I made a decent sugar rose, but what about the borders, I would ask myself. The piping?

I wanted to learn. So I called Jill Whelan, who has owned Cakes by Carolynn in St. Petersburg for 20 years, and asked her to show me some cake decorating tricks.

At her shop on Fifth Avenue N, she took me into the back room, where a large work table was covered in piping bags, pedestals, dyed buttercream frostings and spatulas of all sizes. I stood next to her, prepared to watch her doll up a cake, and she pulled out another stand and set it down in front of me.

"You get one too," she said.

How it went: Working side by side, Whelan taught me how to pipe a border around the inside edge of the first layer of vanilla cake so that it could be filled with Bavarian cream, and how to smooth buttercream frosting so that it creates a crisp edge. On the work table, she showed me how to pipe borders, moving the piping bag in wavelike motions or swirling loops in an over-and-under pattern.

I covered the work space in layers of them and would have been perfectly content piping borders for the rest of the day.

After covering the cake in buttercream, she had me do what she called "side work," piping a border around the bottom edge of the cake to hide any spots I missed with the original layer of frosting. Then, a border around the top edge of the cake. Next came the sugar roses, which I built on the end of a wooden skewer and watched as she dropped them onto the cake with scissors. I piped some leaves with a parchment paper piping bag and cheekily wrote "Happy Birthday" across the top in yellow icing. I finished with a yellow border along the bottom of the cake, a line of tight yellow U-shapes, and then examined my handiwork.

It wasn't the prettiest cake I'd ever seen, but it wasn't the ugliest. There is a level of meticulousness in decorating cakes, akin to building card houses or painting with watercolors. I was in awe of Whelan's patience, both with me and my frequent expletives, and with making enough cakes to fill her tasting room, display case and wall of order forms.

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"Where did your patience come from?" I wanted to ask her. "Teach me that, too."

The verdict: Whelan told me I could take the cake home. And then she brought me a job application.

I decorated one more cake, just for fun, for her display case. This time the cake was chocolate, and I fought hard, losing frequently, with cake crumbs. Whelan followed behind me, picking chocolate chunks out of the white icing with a skewer. I piped hydrangeas across the top, using a small flower tip and dotting icing across one side. I tried piping more roses, but my hands had gotten too warm and the flowers fell apart easily. After several attempts, I stood by proudly as Whelan popped the cake in the case.

Before I left, I mentioned my childhood dreams of cake decorating and told her a story about a different Barbie cake my mom ordered for a birthday party when I was younger (I had a thing for Barbies) — her skirt was made of cake and her dress was piped on. I asked Whelan if she makes any Barbie cakes like that one.

She does.

As it turns out, my mom bought that cake from her shop almost 20 years ago.

Is there something food-related you've always wanted to try but haven't? Let us know what it is, and we'll consider it for this feature. Email Michelle Stark at mstark@tampabay.com with WE TRIED THAT in the subject line.