Much like frosting, this chocolate icing is best spread while warm and sets to a delicious fudgy crispness with a glossy surface. The next best thing to coating your cake in melted chocolate!
Frosting. Cooling to a crispy shell, this cooked icing spread all over a cake or layered up the middle adds a different texture to your cake. It's not any good for piping, but works best with a rustic swooshy knife action.
Sugarpaste is a staple of cake decorating. Used both for covering the cake and making decorations for putting on the cake. White as standard, easily coloured, and dries hard enough to be resilient without being too hard to eat.
Royal icing is the hard, white icing you'll see piped into beautiful curls and shells on a wedding cake. It can also be plastered onto a cake to provide a solid base. This does take more skill than using sugarpaste, but gives you a rock hard surface to work on. When set, hard royal icing allows you to make the most delicate decorations for your cakes.
Buttercream is easy to make, easy to use. Naturally a pale cream colour, you can use any kind of food colouring to change that. Pipe in little rosettes all over a cake as an alternative to spreading the icing on. Buttercream sets to a slight crust but is still easily squished by a careless finger. Be careful as it can be rather sickly sweet.
Whether you think of this as a swiss roll or a jelly roll (or even an ice-cream roll) it's a firm family favourite which is worth mastering. Home made is radically different from shop bought (not that there's anything wrong shop bought) plus you get the chance to fill it with what every you like. Depending on your filling, this cake can also be fat-free!
Victoria sponge is the quintessential afternoon tea and W.I. cake. Tricky to do well, if you can produce a perfect light and fluffy victoria sponge you don't need to learn any decorating techniques as it's perfect sandwiched with jam and just a sprinkling of sugar on top
