Frosting a Cake Without Walking Around the Counter

I frosted cakes on a dinner plate for the better part of twenty years. You set the cake on the plate, plant your feet, and walk around the counter, holding the spatula at the same angle while the cake stays where it is. In a hotel pastry kitchen that worked, because the bench was long and nothing was behind me. In my Baltimore rowhouse it does not, because I have about six feet of counter and a wall on one side of it.

The plate method almost works. You learn to keep your wrist locked and let your feet do the turning. Two things break down in a galley kitchen. You run out of counter at the halfway point and have to shuffle back the other way, so the second half of the cake gets your weaker hand and a slightly different angle. And you are stepping backwards into the path of a husband carrying a stack of dishes. Paul has caught my elbow mid swipe more than once. About a year ago I stopped circling and bought the Kootek 12 inch aluminum turntable instead.

Before that I tried the version where you keep the spatula still and spin the plate with your free hand. That is closer to correct, and it is roughly what a turntable does, but a plate has friction against a countertop. It grabs, lets go, grabs again. You end up with a scalloped shoulder on the cake instead of a straight one. For a while I propped the plate on an upside down mixing bowl. It wobbled, and I stopped.

The job I bought it for was narrow and specific. My niece Maddie was turning nine, she gets a layer cake from me every birthday, and that year the cake was four layers of chocolate with a coffee buttercream. I wanted the sides straight on the first pass, in one spot, without a lap around my own kitchen.

It comes as one piece: 12 inches across, 3.77 inches tall, a pedestal base rather than a flat disc. The height matters more than I expected. It lifts the top of a standard layer cake closer to eye level, so I am looking slightly down at the surface instead of leaning over it. My lower back noticed within the first cake, and it has noticed every cake since.

The change in technique is small and total. My right hand holds the spatula at a fixed angle, about twenty degrees off the surface. My left hand turns the table. The spatula never travels around the cake. The cake travels under the spatula. Because it spins a full 360 degrees in either direction, I turn it clockwise for the sides and the other way when I am pulling a top edge toward me. If you are left handed you simply work the opposite direction, which is not true of every tool in my kitchen.

The non-slip surface is the part I did not expect to care about. A cake on a turntable is a cake on a small raised platform, and if it slides while you are drawing a bench scraper up the side, the whole coat smears. It does not slide on this one. The rubber feet do the same job for the base, so the Kootek stays where I set it instead of skating toward the edge of the counter while I press.

The spatula stays at one angle. The cake travels under it. That is the whole change, and it took me twenty years to stop doing it backwards.

It is also heavier than it looks, which I count as a virtue in a small kitchen. Nothing about it shifts when I lean into a scrape. Cleaning is a warm cloth and a dry towel, and I keep the edge of a metal spatula away from the rim. Aluminum is soft enough that I am not going to test it against a knife.

Storage was my real worry, because in my house a tool either earns a shelf or leaves. This one lives on the top shelf of the pantry cabinet with the springform pans. At 12 inches across it is not going in a drawer and I would not want it there. If you have only shallow drawers and no tall shelf, measure first. What it changed was less the look of the frosting than the time. A cake I used to fight for twenty minutes takes about eight, and the shoulder is straight on the first pass instead of the third.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you that a turntable does not make you better at frosting. It removes one specific obstacle, which is that your body has to travel around a stationary cake, and in a narrow kitchen your body cannot travel cleanly. If your cakes come out lopsided because the buttercream is too cold or the crumb coat is too thin, a spinning table will not fix that. Fix the buttercream first. Then buy the Kootek, or any table, once the frosting itself is behaving.

I would also tell you to skip it if you bake one layer cake a year and your counter is long. Walking around a cake is not hard when you have room to walk. The turntable earns its shelf in a narrow kitchen, or if you decorate often enough that the shuffle gets tiresome. Mine earns it about six times a year between birthdays, the church bake sale and the odd Sunday, and I would buy it again. What I would not do is buy it hoping it teaches you to frost.