Erin Gardner bakes cake and plenty of it in all shapes, sizes, colors and designs. The pastry chef and baker opened Wild Orchid Baking Co. in North Hampton, New Hampshire, eight years ago, offering gorgeously decorated and delicious cakes for all occasions with a specialty in sugar flowers. In 2012, she won $10,000 Food Network's Sweet Genius with a Taj Mahal cake made with surprise ingredients tahini, blood orange and quinoa. While she's closed her shop to concentrate on raising her two kids, she still makes custom cakes and her website ErinBakes.com offers a chance to learn more through classes and her blog and magazine articles.
Now, she's published a new book, Erin Bakes Cake: Make + Bake + Decorate = Your Own Cake Adventure (Sept. 5, Rodale Press). While the cake decor in Erin's new book might seem too complex for the average baker to tackle, the book actually makes it quite easy with mix-and-match techniques allowing us to swap out ingredients to make a new concept each time.
"It's basically my take on cake." says Erin. "I give people all of the components, all of the cake recipes, fillings, frostings, crunchy add-ins and then offer endless ways to kind of recombine all of those elements to make whatever kind of cake you want to make."
Erin specializes in sugar flowers, colorful representations of botanicals that while pretty to look at, aren't necessarily for eating.
"Sugar flowers are flowers made of a sugar paste that while edible are not necessarily delicious. It dries to a hard crust the same way porcelain would but it's made out of sugar and gums. I would take that sugar paste and sculpt it into realistic botanically correct-ish flowers and then use those to decorate wedding cakes and other kinds of celebration cakes."
Erin's gorgeously decorated cakes got her work into publications like Martha Stewart Weddings and Brides Magazine as well as Town & Country, the Knot and more. In her new book, she helps cake decorators make confections both visually pleasing and tasty.
"Sugar flowers came to be my calling card in the wedding cake world. I taught a class on sugar flowers on Craftsy and I've done a number of tutorials and in-person things around those. What I did with that experience of sugar flowers with the book now is I kind of took all of that sculptural experience and then tried to recreate it with things that were actually edible and really delicious. What I've been doing for the past couple of years is taking those techniques and then applying them to things like chocolate and cookie doughs, you know, things that you can sculpt in mold in similar ways but they'll add to the flavor profile of the dessert. (For chocolate) it's more of a sculptural thing, taking the the wet chocolate and applying it to different things to use as molds like foil and acetate and then letting that dry and then reassembling the shapes to build something whether it's hearts or flowers or a bow or cool things like that."
Erin Bakes Cakes allows bakers and decorators to create 572 cake combinations by choosing elements and using them in new ways. Decorating ideas include those flowers but also cakes with fun designs for kids and special occasions.
"The recipe section is broken up into three parts. So I have a chapter on cake, a chapter on creamy and then a chapter on crunchy. In the cake chapter I have all of my cake recipes and those are a little different because I don't have a recipe for... say, in some books you'll see one recipe for pumpkin cake one recipe for strawberry cake - I have an "any" fruit cake. That's my formula for that cake and it works for pumpkin, strawberry, peach, any number of things. In the creamy section I offer any kind of creamy element that you want to add to a cake be it a filling like curds or pastry cream or ganache or frostings."
The book offers recipes for three different kinds of buttercream, including a rarer "Ermine" buttercream, which is increasing in popularity.
"The three buttercream recipes that I include are a Swiss meringue buttercream which is very fine, very light, very refined," she says. "It's the stuff that I used to use when I was making wedding cakes. It's one of the high end buttercreams. And then there's American buttercream which is the sticky sweet stuff that most people are used to, like the canned, but better than canned and then there's Ermine buttercream which was relatively new to me but something that I am so in love with right now. It's a buttercream where you make a cooked custard base and then you whip the butter into the cooked custard. It's as easy as making an American buttercream but it's as light and delicate as the Swiss meringue.
"It came (to me) from a writing assignment that I had for the Craftsy cake decorating blog," she continued. "They wanted a recipe for cooked flour buttercream. So I did research and started looking all these recipes and it's a very kind of old fashioned buttercream recipe that's been around forever. It has a number of names - cooked flour, cooked milk but Ermine seems to be the proper name. And I actually discovered that it is the authentic topping for red velvet cake. It wasn't cream cheese frosting."
Crunchy is another important element in Erin's cake philosophy, because she feels that including a variety of textures helps make for a more interesting cake experience.
It's something that I love because I think when you're making a dessert - and this comes from before my shop and I was the restaurant pastry chef — the textural elements of the dessert are so important and you try to balance between creamy and crunchy and smooth. When I got into the world of cakes the element of crunch was not necessarily always there, so that's something that I like to add. I have a whole chapter on different crunchy elements that you can use to sprinkle inside of your cake or as cake decoration like toffees, brittles, candied nuts, candied basically everything. You can candy crackers and cereal. Candied Cheezits are really good!
All of which any home baker can do, says Erin, thanks to Erin Bakes Cakes
"I wrote it so that anyone can pick it up. There are really easy, accessible things in the book and I even include hacks for making boxed mix taste a little more like scratch cake with ways that you can tweak and kind of dress up stuff that you buy from the store. I understand that not everyone has the time or the wherewithal to make an elaborate cake but they need a cake for a birthday or a bake sale or something. I also think that giving those kinds of tips and hacks for people might invite them to try baking from scratch, to try a simple scratch cake once they've done a little tweak, where they see it's not rocket science."
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