Food - Drink
Ina Garten's Tip For Perfectly Topping Cakes With Powdered Sugar
By MICHELLE WELSCH
Using powdered sugar to decorate a cake is a simple, nearly no-fail approach to converting a basic dessert into an elegant centerpiece. To make sure at-home bakers don't botch even the simplest of techniques, celebrity chef Ina Garten offers a tip to ensure that you can evenly sift the powdered sugar over your dessert.
Instead of holding a sieve over the cake and pouring powdered sugar directly into the sieve, Garten recommends filling the sieve with sugar first, then holding it over the cake to decorate. The sieve can be gently shaken as you move it around to cover the whole top of the cake for an even, downy layer of powdered sugar.
With this approach, the sugar will lay evenly on top of the cake, and it lessens the risk of sprinkling blotchy patterns or dropping small anthills of sugar onto the cake's surface. This small detail can make for a cleaner design and a bigger impact if you want a cake that looks like something a celebrity chef created.