Frosting 1st-Layer of Round Cake

Video Transcript

"Now we'll frost the top of the cake. You want to take, again, a lot of frosting, a good, a good amount there, and you just start in small amounts and you just push that frosting around to the edge, going back and forth, back and forth with the spatula and smoothing it, and trying to stay horizontal as you're doing it. And your, the purpose is to totally coat the cake to seal it from all its crumbs before you start smoothing the frosting. So we just want to get it on there nice and thick, and now we'll be able to smooth it out and make it look perfect. When you smooth the sides, you want to make sure that your spatula is, is exactly vertical. You don't want it tipped out this way and you don't want it tipped in because you want a nice hat box shaped cake. And when you smooth, you can remove a little bit of the frosting, and every time you remove the frosting, you wipe it off on the edge of your bowl so that you have a clean spatula to work on. And you can either move the cake as I'm doing, or you can just leave the cake stationary and spread around. Now while you're doing the sides, you want to get a little bit of a lip here on the top of the cake. I'm going to look all the way around. If you get bare spots, here I got a little bit of a bare spot, so you can add more frosting back on, and then re-smooth it. And when you're satisfied with what you have, then we'll work on the top. Now to frost the smooth and frost the top of the cake, you want to use that little bit of the lip that we developed as we were doing the sides. And you want to clean off your spatula, wipe it off on a, the edge of the bowl, or you can wipe it off on a napkin so you don't have a lot of globs on there that get in the way. And you take the spatula and holding it vertically, you sort of grab the edge of that lip of frosting and you bring it over and then you're horizontal. And now you have frosting on your thing, you want to scrape that off and move down to the next section, and then smooth into the center, always into the center. This is, and it's a very light touch. You're not like pushing hard, very light touch, just barely grabbing the edge and then bringing it over the top and smoothing it into the center. And now when you have the cake completely frosted, you just want to clean up your platter or your tray. You can take a paper napkin or a cloth and put it on your finger like that and just rub that, that frosting, clean that plate off, being careful not to dig into the cake or the frosting that you've just put on."