Hi everyone! Alphabet and Number Cakes are BIG at the moment, thanks to the beautiful tarts and cakes made popular by Aditi Goyal. Today, we’re creating our own version of this sweet trend in cake form.
For this cake video, we’ve created an “A” cake, but anything goes…whether choosing the first letter of the birthday boy or girl’s name, a number to represent their age, or even the first letter of the last name for a wedding rehearsal dinner.
We’ve seen Alphabet and Number “cakes” of layered tarts as well as cookies, but for this tutorial we’ve chosen two thin layers of pound cake with a whipped cream cheese frosting. Just as with naked cake designs, we are only adding frosting to the filling and on top of the cake.
To ensure freshness and prevent the cake from drying out, we’ve also used a simple sugar glaze to coat the edges of the cake.
We hope that you enjoy the video!
Materials:
We used our Pound Cake Recipe poured into a shallow 11×16 inch pan. We used our “A” template to cut out our shapes from the partially frozen cake layer. Decorate with your fruits, chocolate, candies, sprinkles, flowers, or cookies of choice.
Fruit: We used Strawberries, raspberries, cherries
Chocolate Candy Coating, some waves were created with a cake comb.
Dark chocolate nonpareils (or your candy of choice)
Piping Tips: Wilton 12, Ateco 869
Coloring Gel- Mint Green
Flowers: We used mini carnations and buds.
Our cake base was two sheet cake cardboards wrapped tightly with a white plastic tablecloth and stapled beneath to secure.
Piping bags
Very pretty! I’ve seen a lot of these cakes lately. Simple and spectacular as always! :-) Love it!
beautiful and seems way too easy
so the flowers you used, carnations … were they fresh flowers and did you just stick them directly into the cake or where they wrapped?
Thanks Max, yes we used fresh carnations. We just washed the stems and parts of the flower that came into contact with the cake (for most of our flowers the stems were cut almost completely away and just propped up).
From the info that I could find, carnations are considered non-toxic to humans. But for anyone concerned about possible pesticides, etc. that the flowers may have been treated with, you can easily use a barrier beneath them, whether a little piece of waxed paper, candy coating, fondant, etc. that can be removed before slicing. Flower picks are an option too.
It’s a good idea to google the flowers that you are considering for your cakes to ensure that they are non-toxic.
Melissa,
As usual you are right on top of the trends! I love this and can’t wait to make one!
Thank you!
Nancy
Was wondering how you prepared the strawberries you used to decorate the cake… fresh strawberries bleed color when I use them..,
Simple and elegant! I love the look of this trendy cake! Thank you for the tutorial!
~Jennifer
Love!!
Per cottage laws in my state I cant sell anything that has to be refrigerated. If i made this, what frosting would you recommend? I feel buttercream would be too much and heavy
Beautiful and elegant. Can’t wait to make this one. Thank you.
Beautiful, can’t wait to try it! Love this much better than most of the pictures of seen that were cookies!
Video blacked out after five minutes…
Hi Rita, I’m sorry- I’m not sure why the video isn’t cooperating with you. It’s playing normally for me. It could be an issue with your connection. Send us an e-mail if the problem continues! (info@Mycakeschool.com).
*Also, did you try the alternate video format for this video? If you scroll further down, you’ll see the second video. Maybe that one will work better for you.
@Freda- I thought we may have some drops of juice form over time around the strawberries since contact with sugar can have this effect on fruit, but surprisingly did not. I know that this can sometimes be an issue though and so you can always wait until closer to the event to place them on the cake. We did have just a few drops here and there around our raspberries over time, but nothing noticeable (and easily fixable with a small piece of paper towel) ;0) –
@Jen- Have you tried the non-dairy Whipped Meringue Frosting Recipe on our Large Fluffy Frosting Flowers video? This has a light consistency and does not require refrigeration. You can find it here:
https://www.mycakeschool.com/video-tutorials/frosting-flowersvideo-tutorial/
Hi there,
The cake is beautiful. All your baking is fantastic. I want make two numbers cake. My question, how do I make templates for numbers. If you mentioned it, I’m sorry, I didn’t see it
Thank you
Rachelle
Hi Rachelle, I’m glad that you liked it! My “A” was easy enough to just kind of eyeball (I folded my sheet of paper longways, cut out half the letter and then unfolded). But you can find a lot of letter templates by just going to google images and searching for number templates. You can find them on Pinterest too. Here is a link that I found for free number printables but there are many more.
https://www.thoughtco.com/number-stencils-set-1-4086387
This cake is amazing I loved how you added the fruit.What kind of pan did you use for this?
Hi Isabella, we used an 11×16 pan, you can find details on the pan and other supplies used listed beneath the video under Materials.
The cake you made is wonderful when cutting, does it cut well with the whipped cream cheese frosting?
Hi Patricia, Thank you for the nice compliment, we did not have any problem when cutting.
I just love the look of this cake and plan to make it as the number 70. I will be making macaroons to put on as additional decoration but will the cookies get soggy if I place them on the night before. Or will I be able to put them and the other decorations into the cold icing the morning of the event.
Hi Baba- I’m glad that you are making the cake! I haven’t tried this with macarons and so I can’t say for sure. But, I would probably just put them on that morning to be on the safe side if you are worried. This whipped cream frosting will be soft so that you can easily push in the macarons in the morning.
Hi Melissa, my question is more around the pound cake recipe. How do I convert it so that it can fit the cake pan size that you have used?
Hi Neenu- We used one batch of our classic pound cake recipe to pour into our shallow 11×16 pan, and then I was able to cut my two cake layers from that. Is this what you mean?
This pound cake makes 8 cups of batter.
https://www.mycakeschool.com/recipes/pound-cake/