The Ingredient That Made My Cakes Look Like a Bakery Made Them

I have been baking for about twelve years. Not professionally, not even particularly ambitiously, just the kind of regular home baking that means there is usually something in a tin and that birthdays in my family involve a homemade cake rather than a shop-bought one. I am competent. My cakes taste good. For most of those twelve years, they have not looked as good as they taste.

The gap between how a cake tastes and how it looks is a specific frustration that I suspect most home bakers recognise. The sponge is right, the flavour is right, and then the decoration happens and it looks like something a child made, which is fine for a child's birthday and slightly less fine for an adult one. I had tried various approaches to the decoration problem over the years: fondant, which I found difficult to work with; royal icing, which was unforgiving; buttercream, which I could do but which did not give me the clean, professional finish I was looking for.

My name is Beth Sanderson. I am a secondary school art teacher from Norwich, and the irony of being unable to make things look good is not lost on me.

The Drip Cake Problem

My niece asked for a drip cake for her sixteenth birthday. A drip cake is exactly what it sounds like: a cake with a ganache or candy melt drip running down the sides, which looks impressive and is, in theory, achievable at home. I had seen them made on baking programmes and had been wanting to try one. The birthday was the occasion.

I researched drip cakes and found that candy melts were the recommended medium for home bakers because they were more stable and easier to work with than chocolate ganache. I found the FunCakes Deco Melts White at ALTOE. The spec was exactly what I needed: creamy white candy melts with a chocolate-like flavour and texture, meltable in the microwave or via bain-marie, tintable with food colouring, and crucially, remeltable if they harden while you are working. That last feature was the one that made me confident enough to try. The knowledge that a mistake was recoverable rather than final changed my approach entirely.

At £33.29 it was a reasonable investment for a birthday cake that I wanted to get right. I ordered it on a Tuesday. It arrived Thursday, giving me the weekend to practise before the birthday the following Saturday.

The Practice Run

I melted a portion in the microwave on the Friday evening, in thirty-second intervals as recommended, stirring between each. The consistency was smooth and pourable within about two minutes. I tinted a small amount with pink food colouring to test the colour. The white base took the colour evenly and cleanly, producing a consistent pastel pink rather than the streaky result I had been half-expecting.

I practised the drip on a spare cake I had baked for the purpose. The melt poured smoothly, the drips ran down the side at a controlled pace, and the finish was clean and even. When a section hardened before I had finished, I remelted the remainder and continued. The remelt worked perfectly, same consistency, same finish.

I stood in the kitchen looking at the practice cake and felt, for the first time in twelve years of baking, that the decoration looked as good as the cake deserved.

The Birthday Cake

The actual birthday cake was a three-layer vanilla sponge with strawberry buttercream, covered in white buttercream and decorated with a pink Deco Melt drip and some fresh strawberries. My niece, who is sixteen and therefore not easily impressed, said it looked professional. My sister, who has been eating my cakes for twelve years and knows exactly what they usually look like, took a photograph before cutting it.

That photograph is the most reliable measure of success I can offer. My sister does not photograph food unless it looks worth photographing.

Six Months On

I have used the FunCakes Deco Melts for four more cakes since the birthday: a drip cake for a colleague's leaving do, two Christmas cakes with white chocolate-style decorations, and a batch of cake pops for a school bake sale that sold out in about twenty minutes. The consistency has been reliable across all uses. The remelt function has saved me on two occasions when I got distracted and the melt hardened in the bowl.

The white base has been tinted successfully in pink, blue, green, and gold. The colour takes evenly each time. The finish is consistently clean and professional-looking in a way that my previous decoration attempts were not.

Two colleagues who bake have asked what I used for the drip effect after seeing photographs of the cakes. Both have bought the FunCakes Deco Melts. One of them made her first drip cake for her daughter's birthday and sent me a photograph. It looked excellent. I told her the remelt function was the thing that made it possible. She said she had already discovered that.

The Verdict

If you bake regularly and your cakes taste better than they look, candy melts are the ingredient that closes that gap. The FunCakes Deco Melts White are the right choice: the consistency is reliable, the white base takes colour evenly, the microwave melt is quick and straightforward, and the remelt function means mistakes are recoverable rather than catastrophic. They are the ingredient that made my cakes look like a bakery made them, which after twelve years of trying is not a small thing.

Find FunCakes Deco Melts White at ALTOE. Listed in Latest Products, Food, Beverages & Tobacco, Food Items, Cooking & Baking Ingredients, and Edible Baking Decorations.

Make the cake look as good as it tastes. It is possible. This is how.

— Beth Sanderson, Norwich