(calm music) - After trying so hard to
find a wonderful tutorial out there for how to frost a smooth cake and not being able to
find one, I made my own. (calm music) Hi, I'm Lindsay from Life, Love and Sugar and I'm here to show you how to frost a perfectly
smooth cake with buttercream. When I first started frosting cakes, I really wanted to know
that I had crisp corners, smooth edges and there just
wasn't really a great tutorial out there to show you
exactly how to do that. So I'm gonna show you how to
do that today with my tutorial because I know it's gonna
give you the perfect cake. To get started, you wanna
go ahead and have your cake that has a nice crumb coat
on it and some frosting. We've got a vanilla
American buttercream here which is what we're gonna
use to frost our cake and the first thing we're gonna do is frost the top of the cake. I like to use a one cup
measuring cup to grab my frosting 'cause I generally think that's
a good amount of frosting for the top of the cake and I like to use a nine inch spatula and we're just gonna
smooth this frosting out around the top of the cake
and as you're working, be sure to push it off towards the edges. We're gonna get the top of
this as smooth as we can. We're gonna end up having
to smooth it again later but it's always nice to have
a smooth base to start with. We're gonna take our Wilton tip 789. It's an icing tip. Put that in a large icing bag. Go ahead and fill it up
really as much as you can 'cause you're gonna
need a lot of frosting. Try to apply even pressure as you work your way around the cake. We're gonna start at the bottom and work our way up to the top. It's really helpful to have
a turntable for this step so that you can kind of
hold your icing bag steady and turn the cake on the turntable and you can add as much
frosting as you need. You may need multiple
layers for a taller cake. You may need fewer for a shorter cake. Just whatever you need. I like to make sure to
add one more layer here. The reason for that is we
wanna have a lip of frosting that sticks above the
top edge of that cake. We're gonna use that to
give us nice sharp corners and if we don't have
plenty of frosting there, we're gonna have trouble with that. Now that our frosting is
on the sides of the cake, we wanna take our icing smoother. This is an Ateco brand and I actually find that
this one really is the best. I really like to rest the bottom of this on my cardboard cake
circle as flat as I can so I know I'm getting a straight edge. The other thing to keep in
mind with this is the angle. I like to do about a 20 to 30 degree angle as I'm frosting this. I also think that actually helps make a much smoother side there and it actually helps smooth
out some of the air pockets that you can get in your frosting. I would say this is about medium pressure. You wanna make sure you're kind of digging into this frosting a little bit. We're actually removing a
good bit of the frosting that we added but it gives us
a chance to fill in any gaps from where the frosting was added. So you can see here there's
some little open areas and even some of these little air pockets. We're gonna continue
pulling frosting around so that we can fill all these gaps in. Now, if you notice that for the most part, you've got full coverage but there's just some small
areas down here that are open, you can definitely go back
with your offset spatula or even with your piping tip and add frosting where you need to. You don't necessarily have
to put frosting everywhere 'cause as we pull frosting around again, it'll fill in some of the gaps. Just get enough around there that you'll be able to
kind of pull it around and work with it. So now we're gonna keep
smoothing the side of our cake pulling that frosting around,
getting those gaps filled in. Tighter that angle is, the better you're gonna
actually smooth those over. The next thing we're gonna
work on is the corners. This is actually where it's
kind of a make or break with your smooth cake. The better the corners,
the better it looks. Let's take our offset spatula. I like to make sure it's nice
and clean before I start. Carefully bring this frosting in and you wanna try and get
right level with this cake. So try and keep an eye on
where the level of the cake is. So it's a tight angle and we're gonna work from the outside in. Get rid of that frosting. In every couple pulls, you'll
wanna clean this thing off and make sure it's nice
and smooth and ready to go and this is where as I mentioned before when we were adding the
frosting to the sides where it's important to have
the frosting up above the edge because if we didn't have
this raised up above the edge, we'd actually end up with gaps here and so you wouldn't get
as nice of a corner. You wanna apply some
pressure to the outside here so that you're working the air pockets out and smoothing things out but you don't wanna push down so hard that the frosting here slides down. So keep that in mind. So now at this point I like
to kinda give it a look and make sure the sides are even and the way I'd like for them
to be straight up and down 'cause you can still go back and fix any imperfections at
this point if you see them. All right, we're looking pretty solid. I like to remove excess frosting that's left around the base of the cake and I like to use my
offset spatula to do that. So once that's done, we're
ready for our secret trick. Paper towels. You definitely wanna make sure that you have a smooth paper towel. The Viva brand is the
only one I've ever found that is smooth like this. This actually has one side that's a little bit bumpier than the other so we wanna make sure we're
working with the smooth side. Just set that right on top. This is where you're gonna
use your fondant smoother. I know we're not working with fondant. We're using this to
make it nice and smooth. So we're gonna start here applying kind of a light
to medium pressure, not putting too much pressure on the edges but trying to work out
some of the imperfections that might still be in the cake. See how it's looking. Keep going as you need to. Run this along here. It's a little easier to control pressure with your fingers sometimes and have it only in one or two spots rather than the whole
size of your smoother and then the next thing
we're gonna do is the sides. We're just working our way up and down with the fondant smoother
using the paper towel making sure we're going
straight up and down so we keep those nice straight sides. Same with the corners, okay? If we want those perfectly sharp corners, we can take this and we can
kinda work our smoother, our hands and go around
and actually shape these. We can touch the cake and kind of push the frosting
together a little bit as we go and that'll allow us to get
some sharp corners here. Now, you can really keep going with this as much as you want to. This frosting, if you're
using my American buttercream, it is a crusting buttercream. So make sure you're happy with the sides before you move on from this to this. So once you're ready to move
on with decorating your cake, grab your piping bag and your piping tip. We're actually using the
Ateco 844 piping tip. It's a closed star tip that I like. It's nice and large and it'll give you a nice
swirl on top of your cake. I like to start sort of
towards the inside of the cake and do one rotation, another rotation and then just kind of finish it off. Now, we're gonna finish off the cake with one of my favorite things, sprinkles. A good sprinkle mix goes a
long way on a cake like this. Just be ready for them to go everywhere. So there you have it. There's my smooth frosting tutorial. I hope you found it helpful. For the full tutorial and video, please visit lifeloveandsugar.com. (calm music)
