Review

Planet Cake is the book from the famous Sydney boutique cake shop of the same name, renowned for its elaborate sugarcraft creations and celebrity customers. (The shop counts Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Hawkins among its past clients.) The book promises beautifully decorated cakes that are “fabulous, professional, and easy”.

Planet Cake’s distinctive style is cute, cartoonish, and colourful with clean lines. I have never found sugarcraft gastronomically appealing, but was immediately drawn to this book by the basic cake recipes. From chocolate mud, to coconut, and carrot, the unadorned base cakes all have lovely smooth shapes and even textures, unpunctuated by large bubbles or bumps. Having made the chocolate mud cake myself, I can attest that it does turn out like the picture.

Yet another appealing feature is the book’s equal focus on taste and appearance. Rather than being covered in thick layers of marzipan and sugary fondant icing, cakes are “ganached” (i.e. layered with and covered in a smooth layer of ganache) before being covered in a thin layer of coloured fondant.

The chapters are very well structured, making it easy for beginners or more advanced decorators to find their way around. Starting with a solid foundation of cake recipes, equipment and decorating techniques, the book moves onto the decorated cakes in increasing order of difficulty, much like a trainee at Planet Cake would. The step-by-step photographs in the Techniques chapter are particularly helpful.

The only section where the book falls down is in the instructions for the more challenging three-dimensional cakes, as these can be difficult to follow. To shape the Aeroplane cake, for instance, you take a filled cake, “place the template on top and cut around it. Use the off-cuts to build the front of the aeroplane … Taper the tail part downwards”. Whilst the cartoon diagrams do help, the instructions can be confusing, and could prove discouraging for less experienced decorators. In Cutler’s defence, however, these instructions would be difficult to convey without going into perhaps excessive detail, and cake-shaping appears to be an intuitive skill that is best developed through practice. Furthermore, the clear structure of the book means that readers are encouraged to build their skills progressively, rather than head straight for the difficult recipes.

Whilst no-one would pretend that becoming a cake decorator is a simple feat, for the motivated home cook Planet Cake can give you the tools to get there.