When the JC first met Georgia Green in 2018, the JFS alumna had already found baking success, making and decorating cakes for the likes of pop star Rihanna and the model Cara Delevingne.
In fact, it was an Instagram post from Delevingne to her six million followers that catapulted Green to fame, garnering her 6,500 more followers on her account overnight.
Today the Cordon Bleu-trained baker, 31, who operates under the brand name Georgia’s Cakes, has more than 275,000 Instagram followers while her YouTube channel has 341,000 subscribers. She ascribes this social-media success to the pandemic and successive lockdowns.
It has all taken off since she landed in Israel from London in March 2020, days before the first lockdown, the fulfilment of a long-held dream to make aliyah.
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Georgia with her creations (Photo: Sam A Harris)
A lot of her cake-selling and decoration tutorials were already online but with the world stuck at home, demand for her expertise suddenly soared.
“People were in their kitchens decorating cakes to my instructions.” She knows it sounds awful but “Covid has been good for Georgia’s Cakes”.
In other ways, things weren’t so good. The day she arrived in Israel, Green dropped her belongings at her grandparents’ house and headed off to a Purim party.
Then, the corona bomb dropped and, fearing that she’d infect her grandparents, she slept on a friend’s sofa for the following month.
When restrictions eased, she got her own place and opened a cake- decorating school in Tel Aviv with fellow British baker Lee’at Gentely.
As well as continuing with her online business, she opened her cake-decorating school, Baker Street Tel Aviv, with fellow English baker Lee’at Gentely.
“We had big warehouse premises and as at that point you were allowed only a certain number of people per square metre. It meant our classes were one of the few group activities you could do in the city. They were a sell-out.”
However, successive lockdowns, the Israel-Gaza war and that year’s Pesach under lockdown meant business started flagging and the pair decided to close Baker Street Tel Aviv’s doors.
Now her focus has returned to her online work and she her just published a book called Georgia’s Cakes.
While it contains some of her fêted bakes and buttercreams, the glossy hardback is less recipe collection and more manual for wannabe cake decorators with plenty of nuts-and-bolts tips. Here are my top ten.
1. Equipment
You’ll need some simple kit including a turntable, sidescraper and palette knife. It’s worth investing in more than the basic versions as more expensive utensils do give better results. If you can manage it, get a stand mixer. It’s a big investment but in the long run will save you money as you can multi-task while it works away.
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A turntable is a great investment (Photo: Sam A Harris)
2. Tastemade
The taste of a cake is as important as its look so buy good-quality ingredients. Go cheap and your cake won’t taste as good, especially with my recipes, which use a lot of butter and eggs. I always use butter — never margarine.
3. Be boring
Pick your basic sponge recipe and stick to it. My ultimate sponge (on the facing page) is easy to make, foolproof and delicious, and involves barely any washing up. Once you’ve found your favourite recipe, you can adapt the flavours.
4. Miss Swiss
Swiss meringue is the most stable buttercream. It’s made with cooked egg whites — not as hard as it sounds — and the extra protein means it firms up better than regular buttercream. Cooking pasteurises the eggs, which means it’s safe to keep the buttercream in the fridge for a few days.
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Practice makes perfect so use any excuse to bake and hone your skills (Photo: Sam A Harris)
5. Plan to succeed
Cake decorating shouldn’t be chaotic. Spread the process over a few days — bake on day one, decorate on day two — especially if you’re producing multiple cake tiers. A well-wrapped cake is more stable the next day, and once you have added the crumb coat — the first “rough” coat of icing between the cake and the final layer — your cake will be airtight and can be refrigerated overnight. I often take three days to create a cake.
6. Repeat
Practice makes perfect so use any excuse to bake and hone your skills. But don’t use dummy (fake) cakes to do this you — you need a real bake. Reuse the same one by scraping the icing back to the crumb coat and starting again. Or do what I do and keep a cake in the freezer to test new trends.
7. Get naked
Believe it or not, naked cakes — which look barely iced (almost unfinished) are easier to create and are a good way of getting used to your icing tools. Do give them a crumb coat before the naked second coat of icing: exposed sponge can dry out quickly. This is why Green calls them her semi-naked cakes.
8. Do disguise
Decorations such as flowers, meringue kisses and piping details can all hide myriad mistakes, air bubbles and blemishes. A cake with sprinkle coated base and sides can hide gaps between cake and board. The front of your cake should always be the side with fewest faults.
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The taste of a cake is as important as its look (Photo: Sam A Harris)
9. Make friends with your freezer
Chilling your cake quickly will give you a better texture. It’s also easier to create effects such as drips, which cling better on a cold cake. If you can, dedicate a drawer of your freezer to your cooling cake.
10. Safe as houses
When you’ve created your precious cake, keep it in the fridge. It will be safer from knocks and scrapes and a cold cake is less likely to dent. Just remember to bring to room temperature before serving. That said, Brits do like their buttercream on the firm side.
