How To Frost a Square Cake & Get Crisp Corners with Buttercream

Achieve those elusive sharp corners on your square cakes with this step-by-step tutorial. All you need is two spatulas to create square corners, learn how...

1. First, a square “cake” (sorry — didn’t have a real cake around to mess with). Slapped some icing on a square pan, and when I went to clean some icing away, I came up with a perfect square corner without even trying. So I took an intentional swipe at the corner to mess it up a bit so you could see what’s what.

2. With your left hand, hold a spatula vertically in front of you so the right edge of the spatula is where you want the corner to be.

3. With another spatula in your right hand, start adding dabs of icing on the side of the cake running away from you, building up the corner against the “dam” spatula in your left hand.

4. Now gently slide the left hand spatula to the left, slowly bringing it away from the cake side to minimize the lift-off mark

5. Once the corners are built, I generally go back with my bench scraper and clean up the sides between the corners.

6. Same method works to do the corners on top of the cake too, just hold the left hand spatula horizontally (use a larger, elbow spatula to get a longer, cleaner edge)

Comments (31)

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Thank you for the tip. I have to bake a cake for a little boy's first birthday and its a square cake so I am going to try out your method.... again, Thanks. Its awesome knowing that I can get answers to most of my problems out here.... Jyoti

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I use this method all the time, but instead of two spatulas, I use a metal scraper on the corner and wipe it with the spatula. Then I pull the metal scraper back slowly so as not to damage the corner (as though I was smoothing the side of the cake). Works great.