For a lot of people, including me, the rise of COVID-19 has brought out skills that I didn’t know I had.
Like baking— lots and lots of baking.
One thing I’ve always wished for was to be able to make my cakes look as pretty as they taste. And my daughter, who’s my sous-chef in the baking department, is just as excited to help with that.
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When I saw that the Sweet Suite Cake & Candy Supply had a new series of parent/child baking classes, I consulted my sous-chef, and we picked the perfect one: an Easter chick cake decorating class.
On that Saturday morning, Jamey, the owner and operator of the Sweet Suite (who I learned later had trained at a bakery in London), had a yellow mini-cake all ready on a revolving cake stand, an icing bag full of yellow buttercream, an offset spatula, and—what my daughter opened immediately—a goody bag with candy, a container of pastel multi-colored sprinkles, and a bubble wand.
We’d already seen the model cake on the shop’s Facebook page, so had a good idea of how it should look. And Jamey walked us through step by step, with a lot of easy tips. For example, chill your cake after cooling, to help reduce crumbs that can show as you frost, and ice the sides first, then the top.
She swirled her cake around expertly, demonstrating. “What should I do if I don’t have one of these swivel stands?” I asked, as we struggled to copy her deft movements. “Get a stand?” She laughed, and said, “Yes!”
Next, she gave us some orange and black fondant and showed us how to mold it into a triangular beak by gently pressing it between finger and thumb, and how to roll out and shape a curved line to serve as the bird’s eye and eyelash. I wondered if there was an easy way to do a full lash line, and she showed me that too.
My daughter had a good idea of how she wanted her cake (which she’d named ‘Chickie’) to look. So once the face and buttercream wings were on, she topped it with a generous supply of the sprinkles and Skittles from her goody bag, along with a fluffy curl of buttercream.
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We posed in front of the shop’s sprinkle wall with our creation and a plan to come back in a month. Our next quarantine obsession? It might just be cake decorating.
Sweet Suite Cake & Candy Supply is located at 507 CDP Industrial Blvd. “Sweet” 5 in Grovetown. Several classes are coming up including adult royal icing classes parts one and two April 13 and 20; a parent/child Nailed It challenge April 24; and a mother/son superhero cake April 25. Visit facebook.com/SweetSuiteBakeshop or placeful.com/the-sweet-suite-bakeshop.
Danielle Wong Moores is a local freelance writer who’ll never turn down a shrimp cocktail, sushi or cheese dip. Her greatest food influences are her mom and writers MFK Fisher and Amanda Hesser. Her Dine and Dish column will run the second and fourth Friday of each month.
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