The 3 Biggest Mistakes You're Making With Your Homemade Frosting

Cake decorating may be a fine art (quite literally, if it's on a baking show like "Is It Cake?"), but your masterpiece should also be edible. You need to take just as much care making the frosting as you do with the cake. To help with this, we asked Leanne Tran, lead pastry chef at Brooklyn's Le Crocodile, Bar Blondeau, and Wythe Hotel, for her top frosting tips. She feels there are three main mistakes everyone makes with frosting. Well, the first one is frosting-specific, while the other two apply to baking in general but definitely encompass frosting, as well.

The biggest mistake many people make with frosting is allowing it to form bubbles. "If you start with air bubbles in frosting," Tran explains, "it will result in air bubbles in the finished cake that are hard to remove." To keep these bubbles from forming, you'll need to ensure that the frosting maintains the proper consistency and temperature throughout the process.

If you're making a type of frosting that requires cooking, like ganache or seven-minute frosting, Tran says you may need to heat it in a double boiler for a few minutes, then beat it in the mixer for up to half an hour. This should ensure that the frosting is absolutely smooth and bubble-free.

Leanne Tran's other two tips can both be restated in proverb form. She says another mistake people make when baking is rushing through the steps, and you've no doubt heard the old saying, "Haste makes waste." So, unless you're an Olympic sprinter or a race car driver, it's true that the more you hurry, the more apt you are to make errors. Speed frosting is usually not a competitive sport, so unless you're trying to get cast on a "Sugar Rush" reboot (if they ever decide to make one, that is), don't zip through making your frosting. That way, your results will be a whole lot better.

Tran's third tip, "Mak[e] sure each component of a dessert or cake is done with care," seems to be the baking version of "Anything worth doing, is worth doing right," which you quite possibly heard from your parents or grandparents. She goes on to clarify this quote for pastry purposes, telling us that each part of a cake — whether the layers, filling, frosting, or edible decorations — should taste just as good on its own as it does when the cake is assembled.