L.A.’s on the cutting edge of cake. Here are 9 decorating tips from a buttercream queen

Rose Wilde’s West Adams garden is a living, growing hub for L.A.’s vanguard of cake making and decorating. It’s teeming with tomato plants, passion fruit vines, roses, lavender, cosmos, herbs and chickens for eggs.

On a recent July morning under a gazebo in her backyard, the master gardener, preserver and pastry chef behind online bakery Red Bread supplied 16 student decorators with 6-inch layer cakes and several quarts of Swiss meringue buttercream, tinged pale green with tomato leaf oil.

A large catering pan filled with the tomato leaf frosting sat next to whole tomatoes, strawberries and bunches of sunflowers, chamomile blossoms, craspedia and fresh tomato leaves. These are the telltales of L.A.’s most progressive cakes: florals, herbs and fresh fruit and vegetables.

When it comes to cake, Paris is known for technical mastery and trompe l’oeil extravagance, Tokyo for pristine cake architecture and geometry, and Seoul for minimalism and pastel hues.

Los Angeles is on the cutting edge for an aesthetic pioneered by a handful of micro-bakeries led by expert pastry chefs with an eye for beauty.

“We have access to more than anyone else anywhere,” said Wilde, who was a lawyer before the baking life took over. “Abundance and seasonality, how can you not? There’s too much to be inspired by.”

In the middle of a cake renaissance and reinterpreting trends such as intricate, Victorian-era Lambeth piping, L.A.’s most prominent cakes are described as fluid, natural and perfectly imperfect.

“Let the seasons lead,” Wilde said of L.A.’s cake style. “Abundance over precision, lots of asymmetry, soft architecture, and we have a lot of botanical knowledge.”

Holding a pastry bag fitted with her favorite Ateco 796 protruding cone tip, Wilde instructed her class: “Don’t stick to the rivers and lakes that you’re used to. Look for inspiration anywhere and everywhere. Your style comes with practice.”

Here are Wilde’s tips for decorating cakes that will make your buttercream dreams come true:

Use a cake turntable. It’s worth making an investment ($10 to $70) in a rotating cake stand, which has a raised platform and allows you to spin a cake 360 degrees smoothly and continuously.

Make sure your cake is stable. The weight of your cake should be supported by your buttercream: If you’re working with olive oil cake, for example, heavy buttercream is going to stabilize it better. Give yourself a solid base so you have the calm and time to decorate. If your cake is not structurally sound, it’s going to start sliding and melting. She builds the layers of cake with frosting in between and freezes the whole cake overnight.

Have your tools laid out. Choose piping tips before the cake is in front of you. Have your pastry bags filled with buttercream and any decorating items — flowers, fruit, sugar pearls, jams, any powders you want to play with — at the ready and within reach. “Set up your artist space, if you will,” Wilde said, “so you can allow yourself to have the time and space to decorate. If you pull out your cake, then choose your tips, you’re just burning time while the cake is melting.”

Start with a crumb coat. A first, very thin layer of frosting smooths out the surface of the cake, fills in cracks and crevices, and locks in the crumbs. It should be thin enough to see through it.

Get the “first pancakes” out of the way. Use a tray or a sheet of parchment to practice piping on. “Get those ‘first pancake’ swirls out of the way,” Wilde said. “So you’re not putting all of your hopes and dreams into the first squeeze. You can always scrape that back into your bowl.” You can just make buttercream (no cake necessary) and practice piping to see “how this tip or that tip looks.” You should play.

Use an offset spatula correctly. “I always see people on TikTok using it wrong,” Wilde said. Use the back side of the offset spatula. To frost a cake, put a generous dollop of frosting on the top and use either the tip or the bend of the offset spatula as an anchor in the center and spin the cake on your turntable, pushing the frosting away. To spread buttercream on the sides, use crescent-moon-shaped motions with the spatula. If you just go back and forth, it’s a rough motion for cake, Wilde said. The sweep of a “C” shape softens the friction of moving frosting.

Move around. “A lot of students stay in the same position, stiff, moving only their hand and arm,” Wilde said. “I am bending, cocking my head as I move my offset spatula,” even when using a turntable “so I can see what I’m doing.” There is more movement than you think to decorating a cake. Look at it from all sides. If you’re not moving around enough, you’re just decorating one side.

Use the rule of odds. Wilde said she thinks a lot about composition and relies on odd numbers, which force the eye to move around the entirety of the cake to try to resolve a pattern, creating dynamic visual interest.

Let your mistakes guide you. Fight perfectionism. To take the pressure off, don’t be married to one particular outcome. Wilde encourages cake decorators to let the design come organically. Even if you have an exacting plan, you can pivot when your buttercream is nicked or there’s a gap or air bubble. “That’s the perfect place for a flower or a petal,” Wilde said. “When faced with the tyranny of a cake blank canvas, mistakes can be a great open door to creativity.”