Yolanda Gampp, the face of How to Cake It, a hugely successful baking brand, and judge on the Fox cooking competition Crime Scene Kitchen, has made a name for herself on eye-popping cakes. Her YouTube show focuses on making crazy, realistic looking objects with cake, and walking viewers through how to do it themselves.
Now Gampp is looking to walk bakers through how to level up their cakes by layering in explosive flavors and delicious desserts. In Layer Up!: The Ultimate Glow Up Guide for Cakes, set to be released on Tuesday, May 3, she plays with flavor profiles and shares twenty-one “stuffed-cake” recipes (plus seventy-two delicious stand-alone desserts, toppings and buttercreams) to prove that it really is what’s inside that counts.
Modern caking is all about layering, and each stuffed, “dessert-inside” cake (fondant-free) recipe will also include recipes for other desserts, such as key lime pie or cheesecake, that get sandwiched between or placed on top of delicious classic cake layers.
“You can make cheesecake brownies, peanut butter blondies or chocolate chip cookies as stand-alone recipes, or if you have the time, you can layer all the way up and make one of the creations,” Gampp says. “I am in love with every single cake. With every cake that me and my team tried, we had a hard time picking a favorite.”
One of her favorite cakes in the book features baklava. She did it as an open-faced cake so as to not hide the sides with its beautiful layers. It’s a vanilla cake with a honey simple syrup, honey buttercream, layers of baklava in between, little baklava triangles on top of the cake and drizzled honey.
Gampp had previously made what she calls “mega cakes” on her YouTube channel, so it was something she had been interested in translating into its own book. Her previous book, How to Cake It Cakebook, was more focused on the over-the-top designs she’s known for, but with her new book she wanted to focus on the layered flavors and offer something more attainable to bakers at any level.
“I’ve always been passionate about layering flavors and desserts into cakes,” she says. “I made sure that in the book there’s a good balance of cakes that are stuffed with desserts you make yourself, and then cakes that are stuffed with childhood favorite treats that you can buy in the store like sandwich cookies.”
Layer Up!: The Ultimate Glow Up Guide for Cakes, the first self-published book from How to Cake It, is available for pre-order now. As a gift to those who preorder the book, they’ll get exclusive access to a Cake Creation Mini Course where they’ll learn the entire process of building out a cake (from batter to buttercream to beautifully decorating).