Gravity Cakes: Create 45 Amazing Cakes
With the advent of Pinterest and DIY-instructions easily accessible online, Canadians and Americans alike are taking new interest in creating edible art. Gravity Cakes is one trend that’s growing in North America – it’s already hugely popular in Europe.
What are Gravity Cakes? Glad you asked. These are cakes decorated to give the illusion of something pouring mid-air onto the cake. I’ve seen more and more of them one Social Media and frankly, I’ve always thought they were really cool. So I was quite excited when I had the opportunity to review a how-to guide on making these cakes.
Gravity Cakes: Create 45 Amazing Cakes is a “cookbook” by Jakki Friedman and Francesca Librae, published by Robert Rose publishing. I put cookbook in quotes because, to me, it’s more of a DIY instruction manual for decorating cakes rather than a book of recipes. It does have recipes – eight to be exact: vanilla cake, lemon cake, chocolate cake, gluten-free chocolate cake, jumbo chocolate chip cookies, vanilla butter icing, lemon butter icing and chocolate butter icing. However, the focus of this book is the decoration. The art. The gravity defying art.
There are 45 different gravity cakes to try out, the designs cover all the major calendar events from Thanksgiving to graduation. Each design comes with step-by-step colour photos that make it easy to follow the instructions. In fact, there are over 650 photos in total. Peppered throughout the book are helpful tips that make it easier to handle the more complicated bits of the design.
Gravity Cakes hit the shelves in January 2017. At 272 pages, it is the first English-language book on the subject, includes gluten-free recipes and uses only simple recipes with accessible ingredients.
Pictured is the Candy Waterfall, one of the easiest to make and great for a true beginner.