After a rather hectic couple of months full of magazine work, large cake orders and a pile of admin work our Tutorial Tuesday segment is back with a vengeance! Though we still have a myriad of responsibilities plus some fabulous plans for the next few months (why not sign up to our monthy newsletter to stay in the know) we’ve streamlined our work-plan somewhat to help maintain certain aspects of the blog; including our weekly tutorials! Without further ado here is this week’s tutorial… how to pipe pearl borders with royal icing! This handy technique is perfect for finished cakes, adding detail or creating delicate edgings on cupcakes or cookies!
When it comes to working with royal icing you can be forgiven for being a little stand offish if faced with a piping bag of that seemingly tempestuous mix, however, all it takes is one good recipe that you feel comfortable working with and whipping up. That’s why with this week’s tutorial for piping dainty pearl borders we’re sharing our simple recipe for royal icing. Before we tried this recipe we would sadly waste large amounts of icing sugar just to pipe a small pearl or shell border. We often lamented over why so many royal icing recipes listed their ingredients in large volumes and, worse yet, with measurements too odd to scale down. This recipe is possibly the most straightforward we’ve come across, creates the least amount of waste, and it has always yielded what we find the best consistency for piping.
Our royal icing recipe
Whites from 1 medium egg
188g icing/confectioner’s sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice (and extra to wipe down your bowl and whisk attachment)
Kitchen scales
Stand-up mixer with whisk attachment and metal bowl
Small round writing piping tip
Disposable piping bag
Step 1: Wipe down the bowl of your stand up mixer with lemon juice along with your whisk attachment.
Step 2: Add the whites of 1 medium egg to the bowl and whisk on high speed until white and frothy.
Step 3: Add in the icing/confectioner’s sugar and mix until incorporated.
Step 4: Finally add in the lemon juice. You need your royal icing to be the consistency of runny honey so add a little more lemon juice if you find your icing too thick.
Be aware that royal icing never lasts too long. It’s best to always make and use it fresh as the sugar soon begins to crystallize making it hard to work with. If you are, however, going back to using the icing in a few hours we’d recommend covering the icing with cling film/saran wrap directly on the icing’s surface in a bowl and then double covering over the bowl itself. If you also have some royal icing in a piping bag cling film the nozzle of your piping tip to stop the tip from getting clogged with crystallized sugar.
If you find the consistency of the royal icing too thin or thick don’t panic. It’s easy to adjust the consistency by either adding icing sugar gradually if it is too thin or adding a little bit of water if you think it is too thick.
As well as the royal icing you’ll also need a good seamless plain round piping tip (we used a 2.5 writer tip by PME for a small yet dainty pearl size and shape) and a disposable piping bag. As this is the beginner lesson we’ll save the parchment paper cornet/cone tutorial for next week and instead concentrate on the recipe and border piping method!
How to pipe Royal Icing Pearl Borders!
Piping pearl borders with royal icing looks relatively simple and straightforward… that is until you actually physically have to do them! Our top tip to get even, delicate and elegant piped pearl borders is to establish a good rhythm! Even before we begin piping directly onto a cake we have a quick practice on a clean surface to quickly check the consistency of the icing, establish the appropriate pressure we need to get certain sized pearls and to make sure we get a quick rhythm.
To get a nice even rhythm we repeat these three steps in our head until we’ve finished our border work; Squeeze. Stop. Swipe.
Squeeze. Stop. Swipe.
Squeeze the royal icing out at a 45 degree angle between the cake board (or stand) and cake (for cupcakes do this at a 90 degree angle). Squeeze with a nice even pressure. Don’t squeeze too hard or you’ll have royal icing flooding out everywhere. Also, don’t squeeze too fast or you’ll never have control over your border.
Stop when you’ve squeezed enough royal icing to create a lovely glistening pearl. A lot of beginners just keep going when attempting pearl or shell borders as they can look a little like cursive hand-writing and seem unbroken, but these borders are broken. You need to stop to establish a nice rounded pearl shape and not a continuous line of undefined royal icing squiggles!
Swipe the piping bag away in the direction you wish your border to continue with no pressure pushing out more royal icing. This creates a nice tapered or tear drop tail to your pearl which not only creates a good looking border, but helps mark out where your next pearl should be placed. You should then begin your next piped pearl on the tail of your last. When you squeeze once again the royal icing will fill the gap a little, but should still create a lovely defined shape!
Keep practising! Working with royal icing and even piping borders with buttercream takes a little practise to get just right, but you will get there if you keep at it. The brilliant thing about the ‘squeeze. swipe. stop’ method is that it can be used to make almost any border look even and professional. We use this technique to pipe out shell borders and buttercream borders too!
Next week we’ll be showing you the next step at getting used to working with royal icing; piping polka dots plus how to create a parchment paper cornet/cone to use as a piping bag! Royal icing polka dots is a fabulous way to add texture or a pretty yet subtle detail to cakes!
Here is our third instalment of our fang-tastically ghoulish Halloween Tutorial series for this month! This week we show you how to whip up and decorate a batch of fun D.I.Y Monster Cupcakes. These vibrant cakes are perfect for getting children involved with creating some spook-tacular Halloween party treats (they’re also great for fun-loving grown ups too). The great thing about these cupcakes is that you can sit and make a selection of different eyes, tentacles, teeth etc and mix and match them to form your own monsterous creation. We’re sure you’ll think these cupcakes are so ‘ghoul’ you’ll want to scare everyone away rather than share them!
What you will need…
A batch of piped cupcakes in bright colours (we used Vine green, Grape/Violet and Orange)
3 brightly coloured balls of sugarpaste / fondant
1 ball of white sugarpaste / fondant
Toothpicks (cut the sharp ends off if planning to decorate these with kids) Fondant rolling pin Ball tool (with a larger and smaller ball on each end) Edible glue Sprinkles (optional)
Edible glitter (optional)
Scissors Paint brush
Icing sugar or cornstarch to dust your surface Candy melts Disposable piping bags
Step one: Pipe some generous swirls atop your cupcakes in a variety of colours. We used 809 (open round tip), 868 (fine toothed pastry tip) and 828 (larger toothed pastry tip).
Step two: To make eyes roll out balls of white sugarpaste. Indent them with a large ball tool and apply some edible glue inside the impression. Roll up a smaller ball of coloured sugarpaste and gently press this into your white ball. Indent the smaller ball with a smaller ball tool. Roll up another colour in an even smaller size and press this in. Finally take a toothpick or blade tool and create indented lines to create an iris.
Step three: After making the eyeballs you need to assemble them onto toothpicks to position them into your cupcakes. To help stop them sliding down the toothpicks apply a bit of melted candy melt into your toothpick where the eyeball will fit. Before it sets slide your eyeball onto the top and leave to dry. If you’re ready you can insert the eyes into your cupcake when set!
Step four: To create teeth simply play with white fondant to create sharp fangs, picket fence-style buck teeth or more human shaped dentures.
Step five: When it comes to tentacles shape some coloured sugarpaste / fondant into a variety of ‘slug’ shapes (make sure these are long enough to sit from your cupcake to your chosen surface… e.g. plate or cake stand). Add some ‘suckers’ by indenting with a small ball tool, some edible glue and small rolled up balls of coloured sugarpaste.
Step six: Try adding some extra customisation with sprinkles, cut out sugarpaste shapes or edible glitter!
Step seven: Now for the super fun part! Design and decorate your cupcakes with as many eyes, teeth, tentacles, spots etc as you wish.
By the end of this tutorial you should be left with a batch of monsterous treats perfect for petrifying parties and spooky soirées!
Yay! It’s now September which means that the lovely cosiness of Autumn (or Fall depending on where you are) is just around the corner! Autumn and winter are our favourite seasons here at Juniper Cakery and we get excited when they arrive every year. What’s not to love… lovely vibrant crisp golden leaves, cooler weather, bundling up in mis-matched knitwear, hot cocoa, spiced cakes, Halloween festivities and of course Christmas. With all this in mind this week’s tutorial is an adorable autumnal owl in fetching seasonal shades of browns and rust orange. This little creature will sit perfect on top of cupcakes and forest themed cakes!
Step one: Use your chosen base colour to mould what we would describe as an upside down tooth shape as pictured above. Use your finger and thumb to pinch two ‘ears’ for your owl and smooth any stretches/cracks with your fingers.
Step two: Using a small circle cutter and the end of a piping tip cut one small and two extra small circles out.
Step three: Slice the small circle into two halves. Into one of the halves create a ‘feathered’ pattern using the scallop and comb tool.
Step four: Now stick the two extra small circles in place as eyes and the half circle in place as a chest. For extra detail why not cut out smaller circles in an opposite colour and place them on top of the extra small circles, this will add extra dimension to your owl’s eyes.
Step five: Using the piping tip again cut out three circles and add feathered detail using the scallop end of the scallop and comb tool.
Step six: Pinch two of the circles with your finger and thumb to create a tapered ‘wing’.
Step seven: Begin sticking the circles in place overlapping them as you go. Stick the tapered circle on last as this will finish your owl’s wing off nicely.
Step eight: Using a contrasting colour to your owl’s body make a chunky teardrop shape. Use the blade tool to make two slits at the non-tapered end, mould with your fingers to get rid of any sharp/rough edges. Repeat this once more and you now have your owl’s feet!
Step nine: Make a similar, but smaller, shape pinching the edges to get a triangle. Stick between the eyes, poke in two small holes and your owl now has a beak!
Step ten: Stick in place using edible glue by simply sitting your owl on top of them. The weight will secure them and help the glue set.
Step eleven: Roll two small balls of fondant, make an indentation in your owl’s eyes, and press in the two small balls for pupils!
Now you’ve made your very own sugarpaste owl! This can be made in any colour for any occasion and your little owl can be nestled atop a cake and cupcakes!
Since we created our Caramel Mochaccino cupcake complete with a tiny edible coffee cup perched on top we’ve been inundated with messages and emails asking how me made this. So here is our tutorial on how to re-create your own fondant cup of coffee. It’s obviously perfect to top cupcakes with, but also would add to an afternoon tea or dinner ‘scene’ on a cake. Another great thing is that it is super quick and easy to make!
Step one: Roll out your sugarpaste / fondant on a floured surface and using the large end of a piping tube to cut out a circle. This will be your ‘saucer’.
Step two: Using your ball tool indent the centre of your saucer slightly.
Step three: To make your actual coffee cup create a marshmallow shape around 1.5cm heigh. Make sure that the small ends are fairly flat. Set aside.
Step four: To make the handle for your cup roll out a little bit of sugarpaste / fondant into a thin sausage shape.
Step five: Now shape this into a nice sized curve. Set aside.
Step six: Indent your coffee up at the top with your ball tool.
Step seven: Dab some water onto the centre of your saucer and place your cup on top to fix it into place. Paint a little water down one side of your cup and carefully attach your handle.
Step eight: Add some extra detail by painting a ‘logo’ onto the front of the coffee cup with a paintbrush and some food gel colour paste.
Step nine: ‘Pour’ in some coffee by painting the inside of your cup with brown food gel paste!
You should now be left a really fun and playful little coffee cup to nestle atop of coffee flavoured cupcakes! For teacups and tea themed cupcakes make your cups a little more slim and add some traditional pattern like ‘swags’ or polka dots. Also, try painting the edges with edible gold paint and use a weaker brown colour to paint in the actual beverage.
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!
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!
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!
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!
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!
