Emmy in her Element: How to frost a beautiful cake with a butter knife and tin foil

Ready to ditch the piping bags, fancy cake frosting equipment and sprinkles? Today I'm going to show you a quick and easy way to frost a simple but beautiful cake with just a butter knife and some tin foil. You can use wax paper too. In no time flat you will have a dessert that looks as pretty as it tastes! My first tip for frosting a perfect cake, is to make your cake ahead and freeze it. The cake will stay fresh in the freezer, and when you are ready to frost it, just pull it out and you're all ready to go. Freezing the cake makes it super easy to frost without getting those little cake crumbs smeared all around in the pretty frosting. If you don't have time to freeze ahead, you can still use this process you will just have to be a little more careful as you frost not to dig up the cake. Next step, use a little tin foil or wax paper and rip off four pieces. I liked using tin foil because I folded it down over the edges so it would stay put. You want to keep it close to the edges because we are going to pull these off after we frost our cake.

Next, place your first layer of cake on the pan. Plop the frosting in the top center and spread it around the top of the cake leaving 1/2 inch border. This will leave a little space for when you top the cake with the next layer and the frosting "squishes" a little.

The next important tip for cake frosting is to make sure and frost from the TOP down. That means you only want to add more frosting to the very top of the cake, and use your knife to spread it down to the bottom in small circular motions.

Now that the cake is fully covered, we are going to make small circular motions all over the cake to fancy it up a bit. Just use your butter knife. It doesn't have any rhyme or reason, just random circles to make a beautiful cake.