DESSERTS
My employment background as a pastry chef really
helped give me a boost with dessert styling. I have been
hired by clients to style literally thousands of desserts.
I could write an entire book—and perhaps several
volumes—about desserts. However, my goal with this
chapter is to provide you with some very basic styling
techniques that you can rely on for general dessert
styling.Let’s start with cake. But before you begin styling, you
must make some decisions. Are you showing a whole
cake? Or, are you cutting into a cake and showing the
interior of the cake to the camera? Are you showing a
piece of cake? Look at printed tear sheets of cakes if you
are unsure. Th ese go-bys will give you valuable sugges-
tions as to the look you want to achieve in your shot.Whole Cakes
First you will need to determine the fi nished shape of
your hero cake. Th en you can adapt the following tech-
nique to meet your project requirements. Let’s assume
you’re planning to photograph a whole, circular frosted
cake. Purchase four STYROFOAM 8-inch or 9-inch
rounds. Stack the rounds so they are aligned, and secure
them together with three wooden skewers. Cut the
skewers level with the top piece of STYROFOAM.
Insert two heavy wood skewers into one side of the stack
a couple of inches apart so they can serve as handles,
allowing you to maneuver the fake cake as you put
frosting on it. Th e handles also provide control of the
cake for easy placement on a plate or shooting surface.
Once frosted, you can add decorations, stick on candles,
sparklers, etc. Th e beauty of using “fake” cake is that the
cake is perfectly level, and you can frost it as many times
as necessary until you love the look of the frosting. If
you don’t like the frosting appearance, scrape it off and