Assembled Cakes

Once you’re familiar with basic cakes, frostings, fillings, and glazes, it is a simple matter to put the cakes together. The simplest cakes, sheet cakes, are simply flat sheets of cake spread with some kind of frosting, such as buttercream. Rolled cakes start out as thin sheet cakes—you just bake the cake in a sheet pan—but are then coated with filling and rolled up. Only slightly more elaborate are layer cakes, which can be round, square, or rectangular. Because of their height, layer cakes also require some decoration on the sides.