Sometimes you don’t need multi-petaled flowerpaste roses, delicate ruffled peonies or realistic hydrangeas to top floral themed cupcakes and cakes with. If you’re aiming for simple designs and convenience then these super quick and easy fondant roses will be perfect for creating flower adorned treats! They’re also small and sweet (no pun intended) enough to top cookies, mini cakes, whoopie pies and macarons with!
Step one: Cut open your filing pocket so that you can flip it open and shut easily. Using these pockets is a great tip we’ve picked up for flower making. They enable you to create thinner and smoother petal edges. Your petals are also least likely to stick to the clear material!
Step two: Roll and shape a little sugarpaste / fondant into a ‘slug’ shape. Place this inside your clear filing pocket.
Step three: With your sugarpaste / fondant inside your pocket use a fondant rolling pin to roll it out to around 2mm.
Step four: With your sugarpaste / fondant still inside the pocket press and rub along the long edges to get lovely smooth and thin edges.
Step five: Take your piece out from the pocket and lay on an icing sugar dusted surface. Gently begin to roll your sugarpaste / fondant. Pick which end you prefer as your better petal edge and pinch the end you don’t want to show. Your rose should taper slightly to the end.
Step six: To make your leaf shape a small amount into a rough diamond shape.
Step seven: Place this inside your clear filing pocket.
Step eight: Use your finger or thumb to press out and smooth down the edges of your leaf.
Step nine: Remove your leaf and set on a lightly icing sugar dusted surface. Shape the tip of your leaf by pinching the end with your fingers.
Step ten: Lightly scour a vein to your leaf with a veining tool.
Step eleven: Leave your leaf to dry on a curved surface for a more flowing look.
Now you should have a lovely simple rose and leaf to adorn your baked treats with!
In this week’s cake decorating Tutorial Tuesday we show you how to create simple edible sugarpaste bows! These are quick to make and perfect for topping cupcakes with. They’re also easily adapted to match lots of events, parties and seasons. Paint them gold and silver for New Year’s or wedding anniversaries, use red or green sugarpaste for Christmas, stick to pastels for Baby Showers or use bright rainbow colours for fun children’s birthday parties. You can even hand paint small dots and floral patterns for bow topped cupcakes fit for afternoon teas.
Step one: Add a tiny sprinkle of Tylo powder to your sugarpaste to help firm the paste. This makes it dry quicker and firmer.
Step two: Roll out your sugarpaste using your fondant rolling pin. Slice out rectangular pieces using your blade tool like the parts in the image above. The long rectangle is your actual bow piece. The smallest rectangle is the band of your bow. The two medium sized rectangles are the tails of your bow.
Step three: Cut triangular notches out of the bottom of your bow tails.
Step four: Take the longest rectangle and flip over. Paint some edible glue in the middle and gently fold over the ends of the rectangle to the middle. Make sure the loops of the bow stay ‘looped’ or rounded.
Step five: Gently pinch the middle to make the bow shape.
Step six: Take your smallest rectangle and flip it over. Paint edible glue on the back. Place your larger looped bow across so the smallest rectangle can be folded over the pinched centre of the bow.
Step seven: With your piped cupcake fix your bow tails on the top in the middle.
Step eight: Take your large bow section and nestle it on top of the tails and into the buttercream of your cupcake.
Voila! You now have a cupcake finished with a lovely edible bow! You can make these extra fancy by creating sugarpaste cameos or brooches to attach to the centre of your bows, add edible pearls to the buttercream or gild your bows with edible gold or silver leaf!
This week’s cake and cupcake decorating tutorial shows you how to create a beautiful and softly ruffled Anemone! We’ve been seeing Anemone flowers pretty much everywhere over the past couple of months. They’ve been found nestled into bouquets, fabric prints, photography and wedding decor They’re striking and unique on top of cakes and make cupcakes look instantly grown up and sophisticated too!
Step one: Create a ball about the size of a 10 pence coin (or 25 cents in the U.S) with your black sugarpaste. Flatten this slightly and smooth the surface.
Step two: Take your quilting tool and indent lots of ‘dots’ into the surface.
Step three: Cut down your stamens and insert these around the outer edge of the centre of your flower.
Step four: Cover your flower forming cup with foil and dust lightly with icing sugar so your petals won’t stick to the foil.
Step five: Add Tylo powder to the sugarpaste you’re using for the petals.
Step six: To make your petals roll out your sugarpaste thin and cut with your largest rose petals cutters.
Step seven: Now you need to ruffle the edges of your petals. To do this you need to lightly ‘massage’ the edges of your petals with your ball tool atop of a flower foam pad. Tweak the edge ever so slightly with your fingers.
Step eight: We created 10 individual petals to create this Anemone. Nestle the first five petals into your forming cup and slightly atop each other with edible glue fixing them together. Lay the next layer of 5 petals where the petals of the first layer overlap.
Step nine: Add some edible glue to the centre of your petals and attach the stamen studded centre you made earlier.
You should now be left with a gorgeous and elegantly ruffled Anemone flower; perfect for cakes and cupcakes!
In this week’s tutorial we’re going to show you how to master the art of Tappits. Using these cutters to create text on your baked creations is time consuming, but your cakes will end up looking much more sleek and professional!
Whether you’re making a cake for a family member or for a client you will most likely need to add a name or a phrase at some point. There are plenty of alphabet cutters available in the cake decorating world in all sorts of sizes and fonts so you may have used Tappits already. In our experience letters made using larger alphabet cutters are prone to stretching out of shape, or ending up bumpy and ripped at the edges. Letters made using Tappits, on the other hand, are much hardier than they look (they can also be fiddly and need a steady hand) and we’ve found they make any cake look instantly more polished.
Once we mastered our Tappit making skills they soon became one of our most used tools in our kit. In this tutorial we offer you some simple tips to help make using them easier and quicker!
Step one: Using your fondant/sugarpaste rolling pin roll out your modelling paste/sugarpaste as thinly as possible (we use modelling paste as it is much more workable than sugarpaste but sugarpaste will work too if you add a little tylo/tylose powder). Now use the tappit strip cutter to create the perfect size to work with.
Step two: Dust down the current letter you require with a generous amount of icing sugar before you begin. Now press that letter into the modelling paste/sugarpaste and press it down as hard as you can. Using the end of your rolling pin tap/press the tappit again ensuring it has cut through properly.
Step three: Turn your tappit over to see if you can see the edges of your letter poking through. If you can your tappit is ready (if not keep tapping/pressing with the rolling pin). If there is any excess modelling paste/sugarpaste on the outside of your letter use your cocktail stick to remove it.
Step four: Place your rolling pin on a hard surface and rest your tappit set on it while you hold one end. Lean your tappit set forward and begin tapping, with force, until the letter falls out and on to your work surface.
Continue the above process until you have the name, age, phrase you need to finish your baked creation!
As a follow up from our popular How to Make Simple Buttercream tutorial / recipe we thought we’d offer up our tips on whipping up an amazingly decadent chocolate buttercream! This frosting is perfect for mouth watering dark truffle cakes and milk chocolate fudge cakes. You can even use our tips to make an amazingly smooth white chocolate buttercream; perfect with delicious fruity fillings and preserves inside layer cakes.
Our first tip for creating super smooth chocolate frosting is… add melted chocolate! The best thing about adding melted chocolate is that it really helps minimise air bubbles. The second is that by mixing a simple buttercream recipe / method with tempered chocolate is that it becomes a sort of hybrid buttercream-ganache; or ‘butternache’. This makes it perfect for crumb coating cakes.
Perfect chocolate buttercream recipe!
To make enough to fill and ganache/buttercream a 10″ cake of three layers and a 6″ cake of three layers you’d need around 900g of our super smooth chocolate buttercream. This equates to… (NOTE: To make enough to generously frost around 24 cupcakes you’d need around two thirds of the recipe below. Simply multiply the amount per ingredient below by 2 and then divide by 3 e.g. 750g butter x 2 = 1500 / 3 = 500g)
750g butter
400g chocolate callets / buttons (the best are by Callebaut)
400g icing / confectioner’s sugar
12 tablespoons of cocoa powder
Step one: Cut up your butter into small cubes. We use a serrated knife to do this as the serrated edge causes less suction than a straight edge one. This means you shouldn’t be fighting desperately with getting the butter off your knife; a hazardous thing to do at best!
Step three: As the butter is creaming add in the icing sugar a bit at a time.
Step four: In a glass bowl melt up your chocolate callets in either a bain marie (the bowl in a saucepan of hot water) or a microwave (check and stir every 30 seconds to avoid burning).
Step five: Remove from heat once melted and stir until the chocolate has half cooled. Pour your melted chocolate into your mixer bowl with the buttercream and mix.
Step six: Add in the tablespoons of cocoa powder four at a time. Mix. Test your frosting once every 4 tablespoons has been incorporated.
Step four: Mix your frosting at full speed at 30 second intervals; checking each time.
Remember to test, taste and analyse your buttercream as you make it and change the recipe slightly if need be. You need to develop a sort of sixth sense or intuition when it comes to whipping up things like buttercreams and fillings. With our recipe and the advice we offered on our initial How to Make Simple Buttercream post you should be on your way to making perfect and delicious frosting! Buttercream can be a trial and error thing, but with experience you’ll end up with wonderful frosting every time!
We’ve had lots of requests for a tutorial / recipe on how to whip up basic buttercream over the past few months. It would seem that the frosting referred to as simple, basic and even as American buttercream can be somewhat elusive, annoying and tricky. Don’t worry; we’ve found this to be the case too!
Over the years we’ve tried lots of different recipes and we’ve learnt two important things…
1 - Find ingredients you trust
Your basic buttercream recipe is relatively simple. You mix together butter, icing / confectioner’s sugar and a tiny bit of water (or milk, but this means your frosting doesn’t last as long) before adding some flavouring or colour. Sounds simple… but then there are annoying little things that can mess this recipe up like what brand or type of butter you use, how fine or course your icing sugar is and even how much flavouring you add or if you use a liquid food colourant!
The best thing to do is to find or create your own set recipe. Make a few batches using different brands of butter until you’ve found one you enjoy working with (some butters can be hard to mix and will leave you with lots of small clumps in your otherwise smooth buttercream). Use gel paste colours to change the colour of your buttercream as liquid colourings can make your buttercream sloppy. Use a very high quality extracts or essences when adding flavour to your buttercream. Store bought tends to be very watery whereas a good extract/essence is highly concentrated allowing you to only add a small amount for maximum flavour. We’ve tried and tested all sorts of flavourings and once we found these all natural extracts and essences we haven’t used any other; we highly recommend them!
2 - Develop your buttercream intuition
Use the below recipe as a guide but don’t be afraid to play around with ratio! This will help you develop your intuition when it comes to baking and decorating. Don’t just follow a recipe… utilise it! Everything in a recipe is there for a specific reason beyond taste… e.g, the butter in buttercream is a binder and the icing sugar is essentially the stabilising ingredient; without each other or if you have too much of either one you have a mess on your hands.
Consistency-wise you want frosting that feels and looks between a mousse and peanut butter. It needs to be at the same time soft and creamy and stable at room temperature. You should be able to pipe without the buttercream running out or refusing to be piped out.
When it comes to taste you want to be able to taste both main ingredients equally before you add flavouring. Always test your buttercream before you flavour. The sugar should never over power the butter and vice versa.
The recipe below makes enough buttercream to pipe six cupcakes. Use this recipe as a jumping off point to help whip up frosting perfect for you and how you work.
What you need…
250g room temperature butter (try to only use butter or spreads with a fat content similar to butter… low fat spreads have a higher ratio of water which messes with consistency & stability)
250g icing / confectioner’s sugar (you can sift if you like, but a good mixer should whip out the lumps)
1 teaspoon room temperature water or flavouring / extract / essence to ‘loosen’ the frosting
Optional: Gel paste food colour (gels work best as they won’t change the consistency of your frosting)
Step one: Cut up your butter into small cubes. We use a serrated knife to do this as the serrated edge causes less suction than a straight edge one. This means you shouldn’t be fighting desperately with getting the butter off your knife; a hazardous thing to do at best!
Step three: As the butter is creaming add in the icing sugar a bit at a time. Also, add the teaspoon of water or flavouring.
Step four: Mix your frosting at full speed at 30 second intervals; checking each time. Once lovely and creamy add in your food colouring and mix until fully incorporated!
You should now be on your way to buttercream nirvana. After a while of making batches of buttercream and really interacting with it (always tasting and analysing the consistency) you will earn your buttercream intuition badge!
We created a fun gardening themed cake with strawberries last week. We thought that with the lovely British strawberry season in full swing it’d be the perfect time to show everyone how to make fondant strawberries and strawberry blossoms!
The strawberry gardening cake we created was not only filled with delicious British strawberries, but featured some bright fondant / sugarpaste strawberries on top… complete with a fully edible gardening trowel too!
Step one: To begin your strawberry take some red fondant or modelling paste and form it into a rounded conical shape
Step two: To make the ‘seeds’ (or more accurately called achenes) on your strawberries simply take your veining tool and indent notches in rows
Step three: To make the leafy calyx section on top of your strawberry roll out some green fondant / modelling paste, use a marguerite plunger cutter to cut the shape and affix on top with some edible glue
Step four: Use the 5 point end of your tapered star tool to indent into the middle of your calyx topped strawberry… now you have a lovely edible fondant strawberry; perfect to nestle on top of cupcakes and cakes
Now to make the little strawberry blossoms… The following tutorial is a good basic way to make any 4-5 open petal flower. You can use this to make cherry blossoms and hydrangea flowers too. To make different flowers play with shaping or pinching the blossoms into more defined shapes.
Step one: Make a cone with a rounded bulb-like end from some white fondant or modelling paste.
Step two: Using your tapered five point star tool indent a star into the rounded end.
Step three: Separate into full petals using scissors to cut further into the star indentation.
Step four: Using your fingers lightly pull each petal out to separate and press down on each petal.
Step five: To ruffle your petals use the bulbous cone tool to flatten and press into your flower.
Step six: To add the yellow colour that is featured in strawberry blossoms lightly dust some lustre dust onto the petals.
Step seven: To finish off your strawberry blossom cut a few stamens, paint the ends with edible glue, push them into the centre of your flower, finish them by dusting the stamen tips with some lustre dust and leave to dry in flower forming cups.
Step eight: Roll out some green fondant or modelling paste, cut out some leaves and leave to shape and dry on forming waves.
Now you should have some strawberries and strawberry blossoms. These handmade berries are wonderful additions to summer cakes and cupcakes!
It’s time for our fifth cake, recipe & cake decorating tutorial in partnership with The Happy Egg Co.! This month we took inspiration from the soft and beautiful cherry blossoms that flourished not too long ago. Unfortunately, those flowers never last for long but at least you can enjoy edible blossoms in cake form! As well as picking out cherry blossoms for the design we also looked at fun and summery cherry laced flavours! We soon scaled our recipe ideas down to a simple cherry cola and pistachio cake. Why not have a look at our design and development blog post to see our ideas and research.
As well as this month’s flavour we thought we’d show you how to create an elegant and simple birdcage cake. These are definitely on trend at the moment due to the summer months, but also with wedding season upon us they’re popping up everywhere! The romantic colour scheme is perfect for afternoon teas, spring and summer birthdays, engagement parties and weddings.
We added further detail by creating a quilted cake board studded with edible sugar pearls that also found themselves nestled into the cage-work of the cake.
Cake recipe
To create this cake (including the dome layer and 4 circle layers) you will need the following…
7-8 free range eggs by The Happy Egg Co. depending on egg size
453g self raising flour
453g caster sugar
453g butter
6 inch circle cake pan
6 inch ball pan
Cream your butter in a mixer then add the caster sugar. Add in the flour along with half of the happy eggs for around one minute. Once half of the happy eggs are combined add the remaining and mix for about 5 minutes.
Pour into a greased circle cake pan until 2/3 full and place on the top shelf of a pre-heated oven at Gas Mark 3/325F/170C. Bake for around 30 minutes. Repeat this step four times for each circle layer.
For the dome layer pour the remaining batter into one half of your ball pan and bake for 35-45 minutes in an over pre-heated to Gas Mark 3/325F/170C.
Add half of the of butter diced into pieces. Cream the butter in a mixer. Then gradually add icing sugar and the remaining butter (cut into cubes). Once the buttercream is of a smooth consistency separate into three and flavour / colour to taste.
How to assemble your cakes into a birdcage shape!
To create a birdcage shape you need to put together a bullet shaped cake using from four to six layers of circle cake (around 3-4cm in height). You then simply create the dome section by using a ball cake pan. For a cake like this which consists of a fair few layers of cake we’d recommend the use of a a good plastic dowling / dowel rod through the centre for stability.
How to make fondant cherry blossoms!
Now let’s show you how to make your own edible cherry blossom flowers from a ball of modelling paste. This is a fun way to create these blossoms without specific petal cutters and it means that you can make them any size you like; from tiny blossoms to extra large flowers!
Step one: Form your modelling paste into a cone shape with a ball shape at one end.
Step two: Using the tapered star tool press a star into the rounded end of your modelling paste cone. This marks where your petals need to be shaped from.
Step three: Using some scissors cut into your paste using the points of the ‘star’ as markers.
Step four: Flatten and press the petals out using your fingers. Now you should begin to see your blossom form!
Step five: Using the cone tool press lightly into the petals to ruffle them.
Step six: Now pinch the ends of your blossom’s petals to add shape.
Step seven: Cut some stamens to around 1.5cm in length and push them into the centre of your flower.
Step eight: Now add some shimmer and extra colour to your blossom by dusting on some lustre dust with your paintbrush.
Now you should have a gorgeous cherry blossom perfect for sitting on top of your own homemade birdcage cake! Try creating them in white, ivory or different tones of pink to suit your colour scheme. To secure them in place upon your finished birdcage melt down some white chocolate and hold for a few seconds. Chocolate dries quickly and is a great way for holding heavier objects in place on a cake.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this recipe and tutorial on how to create an elegant birdcage cake combined with some fun summer inspired flavours.
This is a (lengthy) blog post we’ve been working on for a while now. Every so often we learn something new and valuable about marketing, styling & photographing our cakes that seems like a miniature revelation. They also seem like things we wish we’d known from the beginning; so we thought we’d compile a post of our new found knowledge for others to refer to.
Photographing cake (and food in general) well is possibly the most important thing you’ll learn, especially if your business depends on selling cake. You want possible clients to aspire to not only have your cakes, but have the moment or lifestyle associated with them. This might sound snooty to some, but what we mean can be interpreted on different levels. Too many cake makers just point and shoot and never make their cakes look the best they can; why sell yourself short?
The ‘aspirational’ ethic can be used to sell a gorgeous five tier, golden, heavily detailed, sugar flower festooned wedding cake that costs £800 or a box of 6 cupcakes for £8. It’s all about want. Look at the small box of our Raspberry Rose and Lemon Daisy cupcakes below. Cupcakes like these shouldn’t cost the earth and we don’t suggest that you have to have a lavish lifestyle to buy them. What we are trying to sell with this photograph is something special yet simple like just 30 minutes in your day to sit and enjoy one. What we are trying to say is that you can have these cupcakes and why shouldn’t you? A small price and a spare half hour to enjoy them is all you need to give up. Photographs of your cakes should not stop at just showing the cake, they should extend into making someone desire your cakes and see them as something special to have!
Anyway, let’s get right into the actual photography part. It is true that you eat with your eyes first, but that is especially true when it comes to running your cake business online or compiling a portfolio. The first thing you’ll need to make your food tantalise the taste buds of clients is a damn good camera with a few essential extras. Shop around for a camera that suits you and your budget. We’d recommend getting a Nikon or Canon camera; preferably one where you can remove and swap lenses; as you progress and learn more you’ll want to experiment and try more techniques so this will help. We shoot everything with a Nikon D5000 DSLR (DSLR = Digital Single Lens Reflex) and swap between two lenses.
For our first lens we use a manual (you focus everything yourself rather than the lens do the work) 50mm lens which is perfect for depth of field and for grabbing lots of light. If you want to really focus in on say a few macarons in the foreground and have a simple tea set or table setting in the background we’d recommend this kind of lens. This can be seen in the photograph below. You can see that lots of lovely morning light floods into the lens and that we’ve manually focused in on the carnations to capture a playful and more dramatic Depth of Field.
Our second lens is an automatic (the lens does all the focusing work) 18-55mm lens that came with our camera. You can set this lens to be manual or automatic which is great for trying out different depths of fields etc. We use this second lens to take photographs like the table setting below because it keeps pretty much everything in the image in focus. For this image we wanted each of the mystery ingredients to be featured instead of just focusing in on one or two leaving some to blur into the background.
Other bits of of our ‘most used’ photographic kit include a Starblitz 2200BA flash (from around 1983, but it still works a charm), frosted yet see through carrier bags (lovely cheap flash diffusers), a collection of lens filters (great for getting good colour balance), white craft / foam boards (an excellent and cheap way to reflect light and reduce shadows) and a Lastolite Ezybox Speed-Light flash diffuser.
Northern Exposure: Getting to Know the Basics of Aperture, Shutter Speed & ISO
Now you know roughly what bits of kit to get to take good photographs don’t expect that to be it. That’s just the beginning. There’s a whole load of other things to read, learn and experience. We’re both lucky to have a fair few years of understanding visual things or working with cameras to have helped us out. One of us has a history in stop animation and the other half of Juniper Cakery has a degree in design so we’ve picked up tricks along the way. This doesn’t mean we know everything; we’re still learning and having light bulb moments today.
Aperture
Simply put, aperture is the hole in the lens of your camera that lets in light. If you’re working manually (which we recommend you at least try) you need to set how big this hole should be depending on your light source. You set them in something known as f-stops. You may have seen them before; they look like this f/1.4 or f/2.8. The basic rule to remember is that the more light you have the smaller your want the hole in your lens to open and vice versa. Think of aperture like your eyes. When the light is so bright it’s blinding you what do you do? You squint and your pupils shrink to limit the light entering. When it’s dark your eyes and pupils open wider in order to gather more light to see.
The larger the f-stop (eg, f/8) the smaller the aperture is. So if you have lots of lovely light flooding into your lens you should make the aperture smaller by using a larger f-stop number. Have a look at this illustration taken from Wikipedia about aperture size and it’s respective f-stop number (if you get confused maybe you should keep a note of it)…
In the photograph below we had lots of light flooding into the lens on a bright morning. For this shot with lots of light happily shining on our cupcakes we made our aperture small with an f-stop of f/5.3. You don’t want to go crazy and make your images too blanched and overexposed (a wee photography sin we’ve committed at times). You want them clear, bright and polished.
The below photograph of our Blueberry Pancake cupcakes was taken on a really dull and overcast day with hardly any light making its way into the lens originally. With this in mind we set our aperture to open wider on f-stop f/1.8. Hey presto, with a wider aperture to let in more light we snapped a lovely photograph that looks like it had lots of light bouncing around it anyway! (Note: We also used our manual 50mm lens to capture this shot which helps gather extra light too.)
Play with aperture when you get a chance, especially when you have a manual lens. Try using a wider aperture / lower f-stop number in normal light to keep your foreground subject sharp and your background burred. This creates what is known as Depth of Field which is great for all photography, but for food photography it’s especially dramatic. In turn, using a smaller aperture / higher f-stop number helps make everything in the foreground and background in focus. In the photograph below of our Raspberry Rose & Cookies ‘n’ Cream we used a wider aperture / lower f-stop of f/2.5 to focus in on the Raspberry Rose cupcake in the foreground. This then helped nicely blur the other cupcakes adding more attention on the closest cupcake.
Shutter Speed
Now we roll onto learning some basic knowledge of shutter speed. Shutter speed is basically setting how long you want the aperture to stay open. When you photograph an image your aperture is set to let certain amounts of light in, but then you need to set the shutter speed to time how long to let that light in for. It works looks generally like 1/100 or 1/30 (or sometimes as just a number like 100 or 30) when set and works similar to aperture; the more light you need in your photograph the longer you need your shutter to stay open (however, the longer you need it open the more you’ll need to use a tripod. The longer the shutter is open the more your image will be blurred from handheld shaking.)
To photograph our Snickerdoodle cupcake on a day that was overcast and stormy yet still had a some light to work with we set our shutter speed to 1/50. This is a slow shutter speed that stays open longer than a higher shutter speed to let in more light.
The lower the shutter speed number the longer it lets light into your lens so this is great for low light situations. The higher the 1/ number the quicker it opens and shuts. Say you were photographing your pet cat gobbling down it’s food… what shutter speed would you use? A higher one! You need to get a nice focus and sharpness and your cat is not going to stop or wait for you to snap it. Luckily you’re probably here to learn how to photograph things that don’t go climbing up trees (or your legs). Anyway slow, medium and fast shutter speeds are approximately…
Slow - 1/13 - 1/100
Medium - 1/105 - 1/300
Fast - 1/305 - 1/1000
ISO
Now to learn a little bit about ISO. ISO comes from the good ol’ days of film photography. Have you ever had to buy a pack of camera film and seen ISO and a number (usually 100, 200 or 400) alongside it? The number is the film’s ISO rating and tells you how sensitive the film your buying is to light. The higher the number the more sensitive the film is to light. Even if you’re using a digital camera and aren’t going to be touching film in the near future ISO still needs to be considered and set accordingly.
The general idea with ISO is that you get a better quality photograph the lower the ISO rating, however, different rules and conditions need to be taken into consideration. For example, If you’re photographing a cake stand full of cupcakes set up in the garden with a gorgeous summer afternoon tea setting then you’re more likely to need an ISO of 100 or 200. This is because of all the nice summer sunlight you’ll have. Your camera (or film if you’re doing it the old fashioned way) needs to not soak in too much light! It needs to resist the light a little bit.
If you’re instead shooting a birthday cake taking pride of place on your dining room table surrounded by party-ware then you’ll generally need to set your ISO to 400 (or in some cases 800). With the lower amount of light indoors you need a sensitive ISO that will grab as much light as possible.
Below is a photograph of an Afternoon Tea themed Raspberry Chambord & Dark Chocolate Truffle cake we took. The ISO for this photograph is 500 because it was taken indoors.
Bright, Young Thing: The Importance of Knowing About Light & How to Use It
One of the major tid-bits of photography wisdom you’ll learn is that you should know and worship light. The majority of photographers try to utilise natural light only, some only photographing with something called ‘The Golden Hour’ (which is the hour of sunrise and of sunset - the best quality of natural light available). We try to do this as much as possible, however, we work insanely long and eyelid shattering hours. Sometimes using natural light is not possible when you’re finishing a large cake at 1am for the client to pick up in eight hours time. In this case you need to be savvy and collect some good equipment!
Below is a photograph of a box of 12 Raspberry Rose and Cookies ‘n’ Cream cupcakes taken during the sunset ‘Golden Hour’ at around 7pm mid-September time. Note the golden hue that shines into the photograph and helps make a great level of contrast.
When you can’t photograph your work within ‘The Golden Hour’ then it’s time to whip out the white boards and maybe even the flash and flash diffuser. White boards are a simple and cheap way to bounce light around to help reduce shadows and get lovely bright photographs. Yes, there is a point when you can just edit away on some photoshopping software, but that can reduce the quality of your photographs if you don’t have the experience or know-how. Plus, by getting your images as perfect as you can before uploading them to your laptop or computer the better; you’ll get to spend less time having to edit things and you’ll be ten times less stressed! Sound good?
Below is a photograph of a slice of our Raspberry Chambord & Dark Chocolate Truffle cake that we snapped mid-day. We used a large foam white board at the head of the table. Then to reduce the heavy shadows that were looming to the right we had another white board held at the side. Look at all the lovely white light flooding the image. The brightness paired with the white table setting helps make the dark chocolate cake really stand out.
What Are You Looking At… Vogue: Showing Off with Composition & Angle
Enough of light, for now, as we’ve established some of the basics in this area. Now let’s move onto another important part of food photography; composition. Composition is something that is perhaps a little harder to explain and grasp. With everyone fitted to the rafters with cameras and image based social media profiles composition seems a little lost. The majority of images are simple point and shoot. What is this? You do what it says on the tin basically. You point your camera or image taking device at your subject and you shoot. No set styling or composition required. For food photography that dazzles and that needs to sell your product composition is important. We’ll go through some basic angles and composition positions in this post, but we’ll go into a bit more detail in a later post on styling as props tend to play a key role in how your composition comes together.
Composition
One basic rule to begin with when working on compositions is that three is definitely a magic number. Odd numbers in photographs (and arranging subjects into triangle formations) make your brain and eyes wander and so this adds interest to an image. The brain automatically pairs items off so throwing a nice odd number into the mix helps makes the brain work and keeps the viewer’s eyes and attention on the photograph and subject(s). Below is a photograph of some Chocolate Ganache & Rose macarons in which we toppled three macarons atop each other as the main focus of the image. In the background two macarons are nestled inside of a teacup which keeps the number of macarons odd.
Rule of Thirds
Another thing that will help you develop good and unique compositions is to understand how to use the grid system known as the ‘Rule of Thirds’. If you have a good camera this is something you can switch on and off in the settings. The grid is simply a set of intersecting lines that appear in the viewfinder of your camera that help you position things well in the shot. If you can’t set or find out how to set up a grid on your camera then you’ll have to use your imagination and train your eye to see one and work to it.
Below is a basic 800 x 531 pixel Rule of Thirds grid with the four intersection points marked with red circles. You can download this and lay it over your photograph in your photo editing software (change the grid’s opacity so you can see through it) to check images you’ve already taken. This is a basic Rule of Thirds grid, a more mathematical one follows the infamous Fibonnacci Spiral which we’ll talk about the part 2 installment of our ‘Let Them See Cake’ post!
Using the grid system basically means that you should consider when you position things in your photograph. You should move around, change focus and play with angle. The four intersecting points of the grid are places where you should try to position your subject. You don’t need to place your subject onto all points though, but it’s a good and easy way to begin when learning. The theory is that we are naturally attracted to things that mimic the propositions of the Rule of Thirds. It’s that “three is the magic number” thing again. Here are a few basic compositional positions using the Rule of Thirds grid that we use…
The Full Centre Position
Another theory of the Rule of Thirds is that our eyes scan an image more naturally along the four intersecting points than dead centre of a photograph. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have your subject centred in your photograph. It just means that that you need to consider how your object is centred. You do this by making sure your intersecting points run through your object like in the image below!
The Third Position
This position relies on your subject sitting more to the side of your photograph leaving a third of the grid essentially free. Look at the below photograph and note that the side of the cake ends on the vertical line on the left. This has left the far left side of the photograph ‘un-filled’. Even though we’ve ‘dressed’ that side with small retro milk bottles and striped straws they’re not the main focus or part of the main subject.
The Horizon Position
This grid position uses the non-focused background, foreground or table setting to help provide part of the composition. It works essentially the same as the Third Position above yet along the horizontal lines of the grid. Try to view your object like something growing out of the horizon. Note that the bottom of the cake sits on the lower intersecting points of the grid and along the lowest line leaving the majority of things under the line ‘free’.
The Dispersed Position
We call this one The Dispersed Position because it relies on the items in your shot being dispersed yet placed strategically. Each object sits on one of the four intersection points. The great thing about this grid position is that you can use the triangle formation (and the use of three items or focal points) really well. You can also cleverly make your items look random, but really they’re not! Look at our image below and note that whilst we’ve placed our cupcakes in a triangle formation we’ve placed the top two cupcakes at a slight angle and the front cupcake is slightly off centre. They all sit on an intersection point so despite the off centred cupcake and the angled back cupcakes the composition still works.
Angle
There are a few staple camera angles and composition shots that are used over and over again. These are just a few that we use…
The Ariel Shot
This is a fun angle and is great for showing off cakes; especially when you’ve worked hard on decorating the tops of them! We used this angle to photograph a Raspberry Chambord & Vanilla cake we then topped with our delicious Raspberry Chambord macarons and edible rose petals. This creates a cool graphic style look and is great to play with. You can centre your cake (or other foodstuffs) or even place it half off-shot and style with cutlery, plates, doilies, cups or ingredients.
The Tilt Shot
This shot shows off a good amount of the top and front of your subject. We call this ‘The Tilt’ as you lean and tilt into your cake. This is a nice simple angle if you want a good shot of your full cake or cupcake.
The Head On Shot
This angle needs you and your lens to focus on your subject pretty much head on. This gets the general shape of a cupcake or the front design of a larger cake. Most cakes (especially tiered) are photographed head on so the tiers, height and shape of the cake are seen well.
The Peek Shot
This angle is supposed to mimic the viewer cheekily peering (or peeking) into a box of cupcakes. It gives the effect of the viewer already having the box in front of them ready to gobble up!
The Up Close & Personal Shot
This angle requires you to move in close to your subject. This shows off your food and the styling really nicely. Add some interest to your photograph by tilting your camera a little either way or ‘cropping’ off a little bit of the image (see the cupcake at the left).
Further Tips
- Set your camera to store your photographs in RAW. If you are serious about photographing your cake (or food in general) and want it to be as professional as possible then go through your camera settings and set your images to RAW. This does take up a lot of space as RAW files are large, but it is worth it. You’ll get much better quality that can be converted via your camera software later into a readable JPG format. It’s like having the original negatives to work from if you shot in film.
- Invest in a few data storage facilities. You’ll be snapping lots of photographs and should keep most of your out-takes (except those horrendous blurred monstrosities) just in case. The amount of times we’ve gone back to an old photoshoot and thought “Why didn’t we use this shot too?” is insane. Generally, when we photograph one subject (eg, a cake or a box of 6 cupcakes etc) we take around 20-50 snaps… sometimes more. All these photographs need to be kept safe somewhere so invest in a few options; a large USB flash drive stick, an external hard drive and something like Dropbox (which is amazing for storage and if you constantly need to transfer photographs to different devices).
There you have it! Our contribution into the food photography discussion of tips and tricks. We hope this post has helped anyone stuck in rut in terms of what to do photography-wise. Keep posted for our next ‘Let Them See Cake’ blog post where we’ll be tackling styling and photoshoot set design!
We love anything involving tea and we had been hankering to put together a tutorial on how to make a teacup or teapot for a while. So in this week’s tutorial we show you how to create an edible teacup and saucer using flower / modelling paste! We loved putting together this teacup and think it is perfect for summer afternoon tea themed parties, weddings and birthdays!
You can definitely fancy it up and add some whimsical fun by adding unusual sprays of sugar flowers nestled into the saucer, or make sugarpaste macarons and cookies to sit next to the cup. Why not add a little teabag string and label into the cup, copy the pattern from a favourite tea set, add some fondant ‘tea’ or create a elegant silver spoon either on the saucer or poking out of the ‘tea’!
Step one: Roll out your modelling paste to around 4mm thick and wider than your tea saucer.
Step two: Dust your sauce with icing sugar (make sure there are no lumps of sugar or this will dent your modelling paste.
Step three: Place your rolled paste into the dish and gently smooth into the contours of the tea saucer. (After a few minutes gently slide out the paste saucer to make sure it comes out easily.)
Step four: Cut away the excess paste from around the saucer like you would when cutting crust away from an un-baked pie. Leave to set.
Step five: To make your teacup handle roll out some modelling paste to about 3 inches making sure one end is tapered. Whilst it is laid on your surface begin to shape it. Keep comparing it to your teacup to make sure it’s the right size. Leave this to set along with your saucer.
Step six: Make the base of your teacup by rolling out some paste into a ‘rope’. Form this into a ring that is a bit bigger than the base of your teacup. Glue the ends together with edible glue.
Step seven: Roll out some paste and cut a circle the same size of the base of your cup. Glue this to the ring / teacup base you made in step six and set aside.
Step eight: The trickiest part is the cup itself so this needs to be checked and planned a little. Cut out a fan shape template from paper and nestle this into your cup to check how it will fit. Adjust the size.
Step nine: Using the template you created in step eight cut out the fan shape in rolled modelling paste. Place the cut modelling paste into your icing sugar dusted teacup and press slightly. Join the edges with edible glue. To reinforce the edges cut a strip of matching fondant and glue over where the edges meet. Leave to set.
Step ten: When all your pieces are set glue each together with some melted white chocolate. For the handle it helps to hold it up whilst the chocolate dries with some bubble wrap underneath.
Step eleven: If you want to create some ‘tea’ to put inside your cup then dust the inside of your cup, mould some tea coloured sugarpaste (you can use this instead of modelling paste as it doesn’t particularly need to hold) into the cup and flatten the top. Place inside your cup and gently mould further into the teacup. You can also paint the top of the ‘tea’ in a light brown colour instead of colouring fondant.
Voila! Now you have an edible teacup and saucer ready to paint, decorate and add to the top of a cake! Lovely floral sprays, polka dots and light stripes work well painted onto teacups along with pearlescent, gold or silver edges. We’re sure that whatever you do to decorate your teacup and saucer will look lovely and striking!
Step one: Cut open your filing pocket so that you can flip it open and shut easily. Using these pockets is a great tip we’ve picked up for flower making. They enable you to create thinner and smoother petal edges. Your petals are also least likely to stick to the clear material!
