How to Make a Basic Birthday Cake at Home

Okay y'all, I had a viewer say, you're not gonna believe it's costing me $75 to buy my grandchild a birthday cake. Please help me, she said. So I sent her the recipes for cake, I sent her the recipes for buttercream, and now I'm giving y'all a lesson in how to ice your cake and save some money. This just the cake, and if you wanted it double this tall, you would use two cake mixes. You could make the cake even if you made it from scratch for about four bucks, okay? The icing would probably be around $9 once you add everything in there. And then whatever you decide to buy to put on the cake, a few colors, and so I mean it's well worth the investment of getting a few tips, a couple of decorating bags to have on hand so that you can make more than one cake. And I'm gonna teach y'all how to make a birthday cake, how to make a shower cake, and, cause I want y'all to be able to do this and save some money, that is ridiculous, really. So we're gonna get started, and y'all stay tuned and let me know what you think about the video, and please tell me if you make your grandkids or children's birthday cakes. Hey y'all, it's Timmy, and today I am gonna show you how to ice a birthday cake so you can save some money. I'm gonna show you how you can make a birthday cake a lot cheaper, and of course, you can make your own buttercream, and you can see that that recipe is in my first cookbook. And, but, let me show you what we did this week. We went by Sam's Club and picked up a case of buttercream. This is 32 pounds of buttercream, or around 30-something dollars. I don't remember if it's 32, might be 35 or 36, who knows. Anyway, it's 30-something dollars for 32 pounds, and that's a lot of icing, and you really don't have to refrigerate it, and this is gonna be good till April of 2023, and I'm gonna ice this cake with that. I'm gonna show y'all a few icing tips and teach y'all a few things about icing, so I went ahead and got a tub of it, and that way I don't have to mix up a bunch of icing. Now, Amy's birthday was December 28th, and I'm making her birthday cake today. Let me tell you what I did. I took a cake mix. This is a butter cake mix by Duncan Hines, all right? I added two tablespoons extra of the salt, room temperature butter, and I added a half cup of flour and a quarter cup of water to the original thing that it tells you to put in there. In other words, I'm stretching it, and it's still pretty doggone thin. If you really wanna make a tall birthday cake that's pretty, you need to use two cake mixes, all right? Or make my homemade cake layer recipe. Now, I'm gonna show you how to ice a cake super easy. They make a tip for icing cakes, but I don't use it. I'm gonna show you how to do it just simple way. Now, I've got a turntable right here, you can see, and I put a wet rag on it so that my cake wouldn't slide around. I'm going ahead and put my cake on the tray, and I really wish this tray was flat, but it's not. So the first thing I'm gonna do is just show you how to ice the cake and how easy it is to ice it. So just get it as straight as you can on your platform, and then you're just gonna take your buttercream and pile it on the top. So put two big heaping spoonfuls on the top, or three, and you're gonna work from there. So what you're gonna do, when you hold a spatula, always put your pointer finger on the tip like that, on the blade, I mean. And when you ice it, instead of trying to go straight and hold it like this, you're gonna have your finger there, and you're gonna kind of press down at an angle. It's gonna help you spread the icing. So you start with a lot, just like I did, and you just spread it. And it does take some practice, but it's not hard. And I'm gonna show you how to smooth it, too. Now, I worked for a bakery when I was young. I started working there when I was in the ninth grade, so at an early age, I learned how to do this, but they showed me how. Okay, as far as my setup goes, you don't have to have this expensive turntable like I've got, but you can buy one pretty cheap, and it's good to have one, all right? You absolutely have to have a spatula. You can use an angled spatula or a straight one. So you're gonna get enough buttercream on the edge of your spatula, and you're going to place it on the top of the cake, and then ice the cake. In other words, you don't take it and do like that. You take it and put it up here, and then let it fall down the side and grab it, just like that. And you can see there's already some from me icing the top. So always start from the top. That keeps you from getting cake crumbs in the icing. It's super fast and easy to do. All right, now we've got it pretty much iced, and I'm gonna show you how to smooth it out. You're just gonna take your spatula and get the excess off the edges, and if you don't have a tray like this, I got it at the Dollar Tree for a sheet cake, you can take a cardboard and line it with parchment paper or aluminum foil. But see how thin this looks, this cake? It should be double as tall to me. So if you want a really tall cake, and I even added extra flour to this cake mix, you're gonna have to get two cake mix boxes of cake mix or make my homemade recipe, it's pretty tall. Now I'm gonna show you how to smooth it off. Okay, you may have to say that again. Will, I gotta get some hot water. Yeah. Can you turn it off for now? Yeah. So get you some warm or hot water in a glass or a spray bottle, okay? And you're gonna just mist the top of the cake or put your spatula down in this water like I'm doing. Especially if you're doing a cake that's special for a baby shower or something like that, you want it to be really pretty on the top and smooth. And then once you get it smooth like that, then you're gonna take your blade and go around the edge one more time. And then when you do that, you're gonna have a point around the edge. See how that's pointed up some? So you're just gonna take your spatula and just get off that excess. Or when you put a border on it, it's not gonna wanna sit on it good. That's all there is to it. Super simple and fast and easy. And believe me, if you just follow those tips, you're gonna be able to ice a cake really easy and save some money. So you're gonna take a bag and put this insert in it. And it has some rings on it so that you can actually put this on there and screw it on just like that. And you can change this off and use different tips. So we'll use this for the bottom border and we're gonna use it for the riding tip. So you can find the bags at your grocery store nowadays and at Walmart. Now, I sell them on my baking. If you go to kitchen, shop my kitchen stuff on the website, I usually tell you to get the 16 inch, which is this larger one, which is the one I like. And you can find the couplings and the tips there at Walmart too, but I'd rather you just go through Amazon and get it because that's where you're not gonna pay any more going through Amazon and that's where my store is. So you can tell we've got white in here and this is actually just a little rosette tip. All it is, is a rosette for you to make a rosette border. So really all you're gonna do is make a circle like that. And you're gonna go all the way around the cake. And remember, I'm just doing a basic birthday cake so that you can get a cake ready for the kids and not have to spend so much money. So this size is considered a quarter sheet, 13 by nine by two. It'll serve 24 people in two inch servings. We'll do a different border on the top, but these little circles, just about anybody can do. And you can practice, especially if you buy a bunch of buttercream like I did, you're gonna have plenty to practice with. You can just put it right back in the book and just always practice with the white and that way you don't mess it up. Now I'm just gonna put a little bit of white in here and we're gonna change out the tip and all this is gonna be for is my writing. So I've got a large one and a smaller one. For the large one, we're gonna use it for the white. So what I'm doing is just getting it ready, pretty much. Okay, because this has already got white in it. I don't like to use colors and stripes in my good bags because it does stain them. So I typically use parchment paper and that way I can throw the bag away. So you can buy squares, you can buy triangles, but all you have to do is take your parchment, grab it with these two fingers. See, it automatically wants to roll to the middle if I hold it like that. You're just gonna let it roll to the middle and then take this and wrap it around there and if you get it fat like that, all you do is pull this hand and push with the interior one and you can get it back to a point. So this is gonna be a border with color. So we're just gonna use the small standard border. I'm gonna put it down in the bottom of my bag. So I'm not gonna use a coupling or any of that because this is a homemade bag, all right? I'm gonna use toothpick. Amy's favorite colors are purple. So I'm gonna dip the toothpick in my purple gel color and this gel color you can buy online on my website. It lasts forever. And there's the purple. And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take it and we're just gonna run it up the inside of the bag and this way, I don't have to stand here and mix up purple. And this will make a mess. So just either leave it in your little bowl but don't lay it on the counter or you'll have purple everywhere. Now, you can see the purple stripe in there and we're just gonna take our white icing and drop it down in there. And this is for the top border. I fold it in like this with my thumb, bring these together and take this side and fold it over like this. That's how I hold my bag. I don't twist it like some bakers do. And you can just tear this off with your scissors. Now, you don't wanna get your purple in your white bucket. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna, because I'm gonna make a few drop flowers in a minute with the purple, what I'm gonna do is just put it in here and that way we can mix it. You can see how it's got that purple stripe and that way we can mix that up and make our little drop flowers with it instead of having to get out more. Okay, so what you're gonna do is you're gonna squeeze and release, squeeze and release. So I'm just gonna do squeeze, release, squeeze, release. And you can make that purple stripe towards the inside of the cake or on the outside of the cake or however you wanna hold it. Simple dimple and it's so pretty. And we didn't have to mix any colors. When I worked at the bakery, this is one of my favorite things to do was stripe in a bag. Usually one bag full will do one border around a sheet cake. So either the top or the bottom, it won't do both. All right? So that was a pretty big bag full of icing. So if you buy the bags, these are 16 inches. I believe they have 12 inches. So a 12 inch bag full would do one border around. All right? I typically stripe the top and don't stripe the bottom. And then if you've got any left like I do, you can take what's left and do something on the corner, like just press it hard and release and then put a circle. And then you're just gonna use what's left after that for the candles. It's really pretty and it's so simple to do, y'all. Now, we're gonna take this purple right here and mix it up. Now, I love to have very small spatulas like this. They're cheap. They're on the website and try to invest in a couple of them. So here's our purple. I'm gonna make it a little bit darker since our border's so dark. These are actually really long toothpicks that come out of the meat department that you tie chicken and, you know, like for meats to use your toothpicks to stick into the legs, to stick them to the breast or whatever. So they're longer. So if you wanna get some longer toothpicks, look in the section where you buy the string to tie up your turkeys and meats and they'll also have these toothpicks. This time, I'm gonna roll it around in the icing. Once you roll it around in the icing, don't stick it back in your gel, okay? Take it straight to the trash. So let's mix this up. And all we needed was a little bit to make a few drop flowers on the cake. And I am just showing y'all how to make drop flowers because anybody can do drop flowers, okay? Go to the Dollar Tree, get some little cars, whatever you wanna put on their cake, okay? Make it simple. Buy your stuff at Dollar Tree or somewhere like that and just put some things on the top. But if you're doing it for an adult or a young adult or a mother or, you know, somebody else or dad, you can just put some drop flowers on it. It has a point in the middle, a flat round circle. We're gonna put it in here. Now, this is a violet color. So if you wanted it darker, you could always add more gel to it. You're just gonna take it. Let's do one in the middle and squeeze it. That's all you gotta do, squeeze it. Just squeeze it and let it go, just like that. And some of them will be prettier than others. Let me get you up close. Some people twist it, but I don't. And like I said, I'm just showing y'all one of the simplest tips to use. Now, at the grocery store, you can buy tips lots of times, but they're plastic. I prefer you use the website or you go to Walmart and buy Wilton tips. And they're not that expensive. You can buy them singles or you can also buy a little smaller kit because this is a larger kit that's pretty expensive and it's on the website, but you can get by with a starter kit with just your basic writing tip. No, that's not a starter kit. That's a cheaper brand of, and you get a lot of tips for less money than Wilton. Either brand works. I mean, they all work. All right, we're gonna make some green. Try not to use too much icing and waste your colors. If you, you know, if you're just gonna make a cake every once or twice a year, just mix up a little at a time like I'm doing. But if you're gonna make cupcakes and different things for, say, if you got a lot of kids or you're making them for your nieces and nephews and stuff like that, you're not, oh, you gotta just refrigerate it in a little bowl. That's airtight. Now, what we're gonna do next is I'm gonna make a writing tip and then I'm gonna use the rest of it for some leaves. So we are going to, hmm. These are really more like wildflowers. So I'm actually gonna give them a stem instead of putting them on a vine like they're growing on a vine because really, they're more like wildflowers. And that's the writing tip, right? This is the writing tip. And then you got your leaf. And we're just gonna put a leaf right where the flower is. And then you can put some longer ones here if you want to. I mean, it ain't nothing to write home about, but it's better than paying 75 bucks for a birthday cake. And I'm gonna tell you, it's gonna taste good, too, to get those little tips off of them. Or you can take some powdered sugar and do it. Now, if you wanted to mix up more colors, you can, but this makes it less mess and less to waste more icing. And the great thing is this white, we can put right back in the bucket that we don't use. So that was the border tip? No, this is the writing tip, the large one. Now, because I wrote it in white, if I were to have to lift that off if I made a mistake, the color will be on top of it and you could actually just take it and lift it off the cake, especially after it dries. And then Amy, A-M-Y. And then you're just gonna take your writing tip and go over the top of the white. Now, if you had put yellow in the flour, you could have wrote in yellow, but you're saving icing. And I'm gonna tell you, if you make a two-pound bag icing recipe like I gave you, it's gonna be just enough to do something like this. You may have to add more to it if you wanna do a lot more colors. And I mean, she is 21, so I'm gonna put two on this side for 20 and one way over here for one. All right, these are my only colors. The blue looks enough like the purple, so we're gonna use the blue for the two and I'm gonna use yellow for the one. And that's all there is to it, y'all. Simple dimple. But now look, if you're gonna make the cake and make the icing to save some money. Now, this is the first time I've ever bought icing in a bucket. I've always made it. And the main reason I'm doing this is so that I can come on here more often and show y'all how to decorate, how to ice cakes. I'm gonna show you how to ice a layer cake, how to decorate if you're doing a baby shower, how to decorate if you're doing a wedding shower, just so that y'all can have some simple ways to make cakes without breaking the bank, all right? Happy birthday, Amy. And thanks for watching Colored Valley Cooks, where we show you how to save money by icing your own and decorating your own birthday cake. See you next time. Love ya.