Professional Cake Decorating

Cake decorating is an art with specific skills that must be studied and practiced before they can be mastered. Professional Cake Decorating is the first guidebook, reference, and at-your-fingertips resource to the special methods and techniques unique to cake decorating.

Professional Cake Decorating is:

• a comprehensive set of lessons designed to teach the skills needed in cake decorating, including basic, intermediate, and advanced piping skills; hand modeling; and gumpaste flowers
• a powerful tool for making dramatic improvements in the overall look and design of cakes
• a valuable training handbook and resource for bakers and decorators
• a comprehensive reference of successful professional skill sets

Using more than 200 step-by-step and finished cake color photographs, as well as over 125 illustrations, this highly visual book covers a wealth of techniques for cake borders, piped flowers, cake writing and piping, royal icing designs, marzipan fruits and figurines, rolled icing, floral patterns, petit fours, gumpaste floral art and design, and much more. Thorough coverage also includes such foundation skills as making shells, rosettes, reverse shells, zigzags, fleur-de-lis, rope, garlands, scrolls, rosebuds, and other confectionary designs.

Complete with more than three dozen tried-and-tested recipes, Professional Cake Decorating is the only book that places the rewards of thirty years of training, traveling, teaching, and private practice in your hands! It is a must-have for today's bakers, cake decorators, specialty shop owners, and independent cake designers.

Customer Reviews:

Review #1: Great!
2007-03-16
My wife just loves this book! It's a textbook used in teaching, but my wife references it almost daily.

Review #2: Look No Farther....
2007-03-09
After reading this book ...I had all my questions answered that I needed to do some techniques....I do have her other books and enjoy those as well..Anyone whose wants a book that has techniques and recipes that are dependable and taste as good as they look this is the book for you....

Review #3: One of the most thorough, well-organized books for (wannabe) professionals
2007-02-13
Some books may have prettier photographs, but nowhere else will you get as thorough an education on technique. Don't get me wrong, the look and feel of the book is still quite nice - just packed with information rather than just glossy pictures. Directions are precise and based on years of experience and training internationally. I love this book because it can take any beginner at cake decorating to a level more advanced than most high-end New York cake decorators - just this one book. Toba Garrett makes other artists' work look like childsplay. I've browsed through tons of other books on cake decorating, bought a few including Colette Peters' Cakes to Dream On, but none of them get you through as many techniques, nor present techniques nearly as complex and professional, as Toba Garrett's Professional Cake Decorating. To be honest, most Americans probably have never even seen most of this stuff in their lives. The savvy might know fondant, but how many people have seen brush embroidery or English and Australian string work (using royal icing to create lacelike effects suspended off the side of a cake)?

In a nutshell, if you're content smothering a yellow cake you made from a box with crisco and sprinkles, don't buy this book. But if you want to learn how to use some of the world's most amazing cake decorating techniques to create one-of-a-kind masterpieces that are too beautiful to eat (and taste good too thanks to delicious recipes for both cakes, fillings, and other items) buy this book and get on the waiting list for one of Toba Garrett's classes in New York at ICE.

Review #4: information packed book for professionals
2007-02-13
this is an ideal how-to book for professionals or serious cake decorators, not for beginners. unlike garrett's other books, which are pretty enough to be coffee table books, this is clearly a textbook meant to be used in a classroom setting, and is priced accordingly. i find it useful as a reference guide when i am unsure of a certain piping technique or need a refresher on australian bridge and extension techniques.

Review #5: Professional Cake Decorating
2007-01-04
The book is dull, and not what I thought it would be. It is not illustrated well. I would like to return it immediately. Please tell me how I can return it?