You’ll love this Valentines Day cake design for its simplicity and its beauty! Just bake up your favorite cake recipe and follow the steps below to create a beautiful cake design.
For this cake I whipped up my Classic Vanilla Layer Cake Recipe, though you can use any recipe you like! My Strawberry Chocolate Cake is another great option for this cake design. Just be sure to choose a white frosting like my American Buttercream Recipe as a base to copy this Valentines Day cake design!
how to create this Valentines day Cake Design:
Step 1: Bake the cake and let it cool completely.
Step 2: While the cake is baking, make and color the frosting. You’ll want to reserve about ½ cup of frosting for the red and ½ cup for the pink.
Step 3: Cover the cake in white frosting and refrigerate it until the icing is firm (about 30 minutes). Read my guide on How to Frost a Cake if you need help with this.
Step 4: Remove cake from fridge once the icing is firm to the touch. Using a small offset spatula or a large pallet knife, take some red and pink frosting and spread large sections of colored frosting randomly around the cake.
Step 5: Serve and enjoy!
Can baking be therapeutic?
I often talk about baking being a therapeutic hobby but I’d like to share more about why I feel that way as well as how it can become a relaxing hobby for you!
When I bake, it’s my creative time. I may put on my favorite nostalgic movie or tv show in the background, or a Spotify playlist titled “French café” and leave my troubles behind.
Sometimes I pour myself a glass of wine and light a candle. Then, with the mood set, the mixing of batter, kneading of dough and smoothing of icing is my only care in the world.
When I say baking is therapeutic, sometimes people respond saying “not for me it isn’t!” I completely understand why someone might feel that way. There have been plenty of times where I spend hours on something only for it to fail or something breaks that shouldn’t or I forget to clean as I go and am left with a disastrous kitchen to clean.
So I should in reality, have a caveat to my “baking as therapy” claims…
Baking is therapy when you curate the experience to be relaxing.
How do you curate that relaxing experience for yourself, you ask?
How to make baking therapeutic…
- Prepare your mind–know that it’s okay if the cake doesn’t rise, or the butter wasn’t chilled enough. Shift your mindset from seeing your failures as mistakes to seeing them as opportunities for learning.
- Prepare your space–I cannot and will not bake on top of a messy kitchen. If I were to do this I would be starting from a place of stress! Take an extra 10 minutes to clean any dishes in the sink and wipe down the counters, this small effort will pay you back greatly in brain space and clarity.
- Clean as you go! I’ll tell you the one way to make baking stressful and tiresome, is to not clean as you go! After I use each ingredient that I no longer need, I put it away.
After each major step in the process, I wipe down the counters and put dishes that are no longer needed in the sink. If there is chill time or baking time I don’t sit, I do the cleaning then. Make this shift and you’ll really notice the difference!
By the way, this last tip really helped me when I was on The Great American Baking Show–and the crew that cleaned up behind us made a point to tell me that my workspace was always so clean they didn’t have much to do!
I would reply by saying “it’s how I stay sane in this tent!”
Additional suggestions:
*Maybe try printing off the recipe instead of looking at it on your phone, tablet or laptop and use this time to unplug from technology for a few hours
**Invite friends or family over to share your creation with you. Time spent with loved ones over food is a universally special experience
And that’s how I discovered baking for my mental health. If you try any of these suggestions, let me know how it went for you! I’m really invested in spreading this message to others in hopes that baking will enhance your lives more than it already does!
Happy Decorating!
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