For years I iced cakes with a butter knife and a lot of swearing. The trouble is your knuckles. With a straight blade, your hand drags through the icing on top of the cake every time you try to get the blade flat.
So what’s different about an offset spatula?
Some British recipes call it a cranked palette knife. There’s a bend in the blade just after the handle, which lifts your hand clear of the cake, so the blade can lie flat on the surface. Smooth top in a few sweeps, no knuckle prints. It sounds trivial until you try it.
Do I need it, or is that just kit-creep?
You can get by without one if you mostly make traybakes with a dollop of icing. Once you start doing sandwich cakes with iced sides, or anything you want to look neat for a birthday, you’ll wonder how you managed before. It’s also handy for things you wouldn’t expect: levelling batter in a tin before it goes in the oven, lifting biscuits off a tray, spreading melted chocolate thin for bark.
Which one?
I’d get the Ateco Ultra Offset Spatula 3 Piece Set rather than a single knife. You get a 4.25 inch blade for cupcakes and brownies, a 7.75 inch one that handles an 8 or 9 inch sandwich cake, and a 9.75 inch one for big layer cakes and for shifting a whole sponge layer from plate to plate. The small one gets picked up far more than you’d guess.
The steel blades are taper ground, so they thin out and flex more towards the tip, which is what lets you feather icing out smoothly. Handles are plastic rather than wood. Less pretty, but it means all three are dishwasher safe.
Any tips for a smoother finish?
Do a thin crumb coat first and chill the cake for twenty minutes. Dip the blade in hot water and wipe it dry before the final pass. Three or four confident sweeps beat twenty nervous ones every time.
