How to Decorate a Cake- How to Level, Tort, and Fill Your Cake

Learn the basic techniques of cake decorating with this instructional video guide - How to Level, Tort, and Fill Your Cake

Hi! I'm Sandy Sheppard, a Master Cake Decorator. I'm here to show you today, how to fill your cake and to make sure it's nice and leveled, so that when you fill it and stack the two cakes together that they will have a complete leveled look at the end. First I like to choose whichever cake I'm going to put on the bottom, and doesn't really matter much, but this one is sitting really flat and this one has got just a slightest slope to it. So I'm going to use that one as my bottom cake. Now I just take a little bit of my icing and put it on the wax side of my cardboard, spread it on there, that works like my glue. Then I can take my cake, which is well cooled and I can put the cake circle on that and turn it over, ta-da! There you go! I just realized that I didn't have my pastry bag full of icing and I need that for my next step. This is one of those large plastic bags which I've shown you earlier. I have my coupler without the ring on it, I've taken the ring off. Now put the coupler into the bag and slide it on down in there. When cutting a pastry bag to fit with the plastic bag, I need to cut it right there at the top of the ring. So I'm going to scoot that bag just a tiny bit, and grabbing my scissors, trim it off a little bit more, and press it back down in there. Now I'm ready to fill my bag. Notice how I folded the top down, so it forms this nice cup, makes it an easy place for my hand to hold it, keeps my hand from getting messy as well as keeps the top of the bag from becoming too messy. I am going to take a nice scoop of icing, slide it right down into the bag, and then I scrape that spatula off against my thumb as I pull it out. That's plenty for what we need today. Once I've got the icing in the bag, I'm going to take it up at the top here and squeeze, bringing it down to the coupler, and give a little squeeze to come it out at the tip. Alright! Now I'm ready to start filling my cake. I want to keep my icing covered, because my icing does dry to the touch and I like to keep the top of it moist as well. I have my cake set on a little turn table just for my own ease and I've got my icing in the coupler and I'm going to start to just squeeze a little wall of icing, all the way around the cake till I get back to the beginning, ta-da! See, that's all I needed that for. We're going to fill this chocolate cake today with a dulce de leche. This is a Spanish, South American tradition, but it's a wonderful caramel, has a nice creamy consistency, very easy for spreading, but thick enough to hold in the nice cake and stay. I'm going to -- if I can get a hold of the edge of the cardboard, there we go. Slide this around, spread this around nicely into the cake. When you're filling a cake, let's say, you've got a nice raspberry filling that you like to use. One of the things that's important to remember is not to overfill the cake. If you get your filling higher than the wall of icing, and you put your other cake on top of it, it's going to ooze out the middle. So keep your filling below that icing wall, so that it won't come out the middle. I'm nuts, that's sliding too much for me today. So I just get this spread around nicely. That will be a nice caramel and chocolate is always a good combination, and there we go. I'm going to set that aside. Now for a minute, I'm going to set this aside. I'm going to take my other cake, which I see a slope too. Now maybe that's fine for you and you could use that if you really wanted to, but I like my cake to even be a little more leveled. So I'm going to take my nice, serrated knife, and I'm going to hold that nice and even, and just zigzag saw -- now you see I'm holding the cake over here, but as soon as I get that knife near me, I'm going to get my hand out of the way, because it will certainly cut my fingers. I'm going to take off the top. Now to check the levelness of that cake, I'm going to turn it upside down again and now I can see it's nice and leveled. I always like to ice my cakes with the bottom side up, this is the part that was in the bottom of the pan, the bottom side up because it has a real smooth finish to it. Alright, I've got my other cake all prepared. Now I'm going to set that cake on top of it. I forget, many of my students always fuss at me when I grab a cake like this and just pick it up, because they're like, Wow! You can do that, they're kind of surprised. If you're not accustomed to handling cakes like I am, there's another technique to use. Have your cake set on a cardboard circle and then when you pick it up, it's easier to hold, you can gently put your cake at the edge of the other cake and wiggle and pull that cardboard circle out of your way. Press the top of the cake down, this helps stick it together with that glue in the middle. Then you're good to go. The next thing I'm going to show you is how to crumb-coat a cake.