Perth is known both nationally and globally for its creative culinary scene. Local bakers are big fans of whipping up custom cakes. The national press that has written about the Perth craft culinary scene in recent years has been effusive in their praise. Custom cakes, in particular, seem to knock reporters’ socks off. In our experience, they’ve been pretty stunning to look at once we’re done crafting them, too. I mean, hey, we are the artists here! And when it comes to custom cakes, if you can dream it, we can craft it (or at a minimum, we can help you figure out how to make it work) in a way that simply does not exist anywhere else.
Getting Started with Strategy and Concept Development
Each work of art commences with an idea. When it comes to creating a custom cake in the city of Perth, there’s no exception to this rule. The first move is always a consultation: the customer and the cake artist need to have a little chat. Here, the cake artist tends to get a lot of details about the event this cake is for, what it is supposed to be like in its appearance, and what it is supposed to be like in its taste.
Devising and Plotting
Once the idea for the cake has been settled, the baker begins the design process. Working with a nearly boundless palette of ingredients, they’re able to create astonishingly beautiful cakes that taste every bit as good as they look. Sketching the cake’s appearance is the first step. From there, the baker moves onto the “structure” of the cake: how many layers it will have, what type of divisions will be between the layers (buttercream or a ganache, for instance), what those divisions will taste like, and what the cake as a whole will taste like.
Obtaining High-Quality Components
Any great cake starts at the same place: a list of ingredients. For bakers in Perth, this is a point of passion. They stress that they source the best ingredients from the best places, and this is what gives their cake that extra je ne sais quoi. Rich, high-quality Belgian chocolate, imported vanilla, flour milled from organic whatever… they’re snobs about what goes into their mixing bowls, and for good reason—artisan cakes here are damned tasty.
Preparing the Cake Levels
Arranging and selecting each ingredient is a big step, but once that’s done, the process really begins when the layers are baked. Layer cakes simply must be baked perfectly if they’re to stand up to the kind of viewing and decoration we expect. This is the kind of expert work few of us can really pull off, and I think an argument can be made that it’s as hard as anything a top pastry chef in a good restaurant does.
Constructing by Carving and Putting Together
Baking and cooling the cake are just the first steps. Sculpting and assembly really let the baker’s talents shine. Run that over again in your head. The cake baker is also a sculptor, a performance artist of sugar and flour. Of the two, assembly seems the most straightforward and satisfying. Stack up the cake, one layer at a time, with lots of buttercream or whatever in between—mousse, jam, ganache, you name it—to hold them together and keep most of the cake from wobbling.
Applying a Crumb Coat and Icing
The cake takes form with a simple structure. Thin frosting goes on next and captures any loose crumbs. This process is called the crumb coat and it does exactly that: it coats the crumbs. With the crumb coat in place, the next layer of frosting can go over the “crumb captured” cake and comes out looking clean and not, well, crummy. You don’t want it to look like the frosting has some disease. So, in my case, the crumb coat is something that must be counted on.
In Perth, the creation of custom cakes reaches its culmination in the act of cake decoration. At this point in the process, bakers have the unique chance to turn an already delicious cake into an amazing work of art that people want to look at as much as they also want to eat. When it comes to decoration, endless tools and techniques are at a baker’s disposal, from the very simple and traditional, to those that are more complex and innovative. In the end, no matter what way a baker works to declare the presence of a cake—edible and inedible flowers, hand-painted details, biscuits in the shapes of little men—every custom cake is a clean testament to the skill, creativity, and attention to detail that a baker devotes to it.
Presentation and Delivery
The journey isn’t over when the cake is finished. How the cake gets to the event and how it is presented there are of great importance—and often largely up to the baker. In other words, once the cake is out the door, the service might not be over, but the performance part of it is just beginning. The appearance and “presence” of the cake are vital, and indeed it is often both the climax and the unique selling point of the celebration (or the climax of the event, if the event is what you are selling).
In the End
Making exceptionally beautiful custom cakes Perth takes more than just talent—it’s a labor of love that artfully blends imaginative design with in-depth knowledge and passionate problem-solving. Science and art work hand in hand during custom cake construction. Once the chosen ingredients have been seared into memory, the real work begins, with simulation of the natural world in cake form. A lot happens in a cake kitchen in Perth; decisions are made, artistic problems are solved, and talents are given incredible opportunity to truly shine. Which is why every cake has its own story to tell, and every client has a chance to ensure that their cake says exactly what they want without actually speaking.
