Cakesdecor Gazette 5.06 June 2016

I have to say Sharon, I read your editorial and thought it was spot on. Having worked on many dummy cakes, tis true, no where near the same amount of difficulty as real cake!! Especially getting that smooth undercoat, whether it be buttercream, or ganache. I find myself now looking at some of the posted cakes here and wondering, are they real…all cake…,partial cake?…all dummies…partial dummies and cake? Unless specified, you really can’t know, can you. I like to be up front with my cakes and say if any or all of my cake are are dummies, real cake or combos of both. But, that’s just me. I do belive you are correct that unless you’ve actually covered and decorated a “real cake” , you can’t consider yourself a true " cake decorator". As an FYI…when I got married in the late 70’s, it was all the rage to “Rent” a decorated cake dummy for your wedding cake. All my friends, including me, did it.

Thanks June for your feedback. There are still quite a lot of places that do the rented cake thing, they even had a couple go on Shark Tank here in America with the idea as well. And I get it I truly do, it makes perfect sense to me why some will choose to do that on their wedding day. For me it is more the ones that are getting a lot of attention from Magazines or making top 3 here on CD. I feel sometimes all of us are getting lost in the beauty of a piece and not always seeing it as what it might be , which could be fake. Then those others that are posting with real cakes, which we agree upon are much harder to create cannot even get a comment or a like. I appreciate the beauty of a cake but nothing can beat knowing your craft and working with real cake, that takes skill!
Big hugs June I am so glad you are apart of this community , you are always kind, caring and supportive of our lovely industry!

Going to reed it after dinner …. a moment for my self and cakesdecor 😉😃😃

A very interesting read! I do not own a business but I decorate a lot of cakes for family and friends which are always real cakes. I use the old traditonal fruit cakes and cover the cakes in marzipan and then in sugarpaste to get as perfect a finish as possible. I tend to use dummies for collaborations and for magazine features or when trying out some particular technique, as my family are frankly fed up of eating cake all th time! However I tend to stick to designs which could easily and as successfully be done with real cake.

Cake designing/decorating, modeling and all forms of sugar art is my retirement hobby. Can I bake cakes? Absolutely! I am baking two apple pound cakes and one Hummingbird cake today, none of them pretty, all of them delicious. Do I ever use cake dummies? Absolutely! If I didn’t, my husband and I would have to eat entirely too much cake! I do a few cakes for friends and family and the occasional customer, but not nearly enough to satisfy my desire to practice the art. My favorite things are making gum paste flowers and modeling figures with chocolate and sometimes rice cereal treats. Do I consider myself a cake designer/decorator? Not really. I do have unlimited time to devote to each project and I do have complete freedom to do whatever I choose, but I cannot pipe and I cannot get a perfect finish with either buttercream or fondant on a cake or a dummy! No, I am not a cake artist, but I do consider myself a SUGAR artist and I so love being a part of the cake community. I think the medium is diverse enough to encompass all of us.

I think you are correct Sandra, I think Sugar artist is a much better term for many of us. My family is just like yours probably, they are tired of seeing cake and after all these years no longer really wish to eat it any more,lol. I love what dummy cakes give us the freedom to do and to experiment with designs that we would probably never get to do otherwise. But you are cooking cakes and I must say that I do not think any cake decorator needs to be able to get a smooth surface or be able to do all techniques to be called a cake decorator, but they should be using real cake in some form. So for me if you have cakes in the oven then yes love you are a cake decorator!

As already said, my family are also really tired of eating cakes! The ones with buttercream, ganache and fondant. But they still love simple cakes like lemon pound cakes and all the french pastries. So i bake them those kind of cakes. Not perfect, but they love it. I’m not doing business, but have some friends who order from me. So for family and friends i make real cakes, for collaborations i use mostly dummies. I prefer to work with real cakes even they give me more headaches and tears for stacking tired cakes or for some special designs like gravity defying, sculpted and 3D cakes. I don’t have spare time to practice. I’m learning by doing and collaborations are the best opportunities for that. I’m making cake since only 2 1/2 years so i don’t know if i could call myself as a cake artist. Before i never have baked!! And i was very surprised to see my Breakfast at Tiffany’s cake for the Audrey Hepburn collaboration on the Monthly Top 5 of this month’s issue of CD Gazette. Making happy dance 💕💕

Wow, the months sure fly by lately! Can’t believe it is June already! Thank you so much Shags for putting together another fascinating Gazette! I loved reading!

Wonderful responses. I like your terminology Sandra….Sugar Artist. I’m definitely not a cake designer/decorator in the truest sense…I always call myself a hobby baker (decorator). Big difference.
I also agree with you Shags, many lovely well executed cakes on CD get passed over for the Ooo & Ahh large decorative cakes. There’s merit and beauty in all the cakes that are posted. That’s why I try and comment on as many as I can. I kind comment can go a long way …just like a friendly smile.. 😎

Very interesting read indeed. I’ve often thought to myself when looking at some of the “cakes” on here and other sites “how in the heck did they do that??” I’ve always just thought that they are people who have way more cakes under their belts and so have developed mad skills.

I assume, maybe incorrectly, that most of the collab cakes are not real but as someone who has never been a part of one I wasn’t sure. I figured why would they waste making a cake just to photograph it? Funny though as I assumed that competition cakes were real cakes I guess because they were being seen in person. Guess I was way wrong on that? Again, I’ve never taken part in a competition other than submitting photos of my cakes for online contests.

I am just a hobby baker doing cakes for family, friends and a few others who have heard of my cakes by word of mouth. I’ve never taken a class other than watching bits and pieces of Craftsy classes. I’ve learned by tutorials, online reading, feedback from sites like this and good old trial and error. The first tiered cake I did had no support whatsoever cause I had no idea that was a thing. It even traveled over rather bumpy roads and survived! I guess when it comes right down to it I am pretty naive about the cake world and what is real and what is not.

I often get down on myself because “look what this person was able to make out of cake!” and feel that my creations just pale in comparison but mine are actually cake. I’ve only ever used dummies on four occasions. Each time it was for a tiered cake because the design looked better as a tiered cake but we didn’t require that much cake. For instance, the bottom tier of this cake is a dummy but his head and hat are all cake.

Every now and then I use rkt to help out in getting a shape right but not very often cause I’m usually too stunned to think life would be easier doing it that way than making it all out of cake. Lol. There was one TV show I actually stopped watching because I found the cakes were composed of more rkt than cake and to me, that’s not a cake. It’s rkt with some cake. I thought it was misleading to be calling them cakes.

Not to take anything away from those who decorate dummies, they are gorgeous, but I personally don’t think they should be called cakes.

I’m so glad you wrote this. It was an enjoyable read and an eye opener for sure!