A piece of cake — Book offers decorating tips for any occasion

You can have a fun special-occasion cake without spending lots of money at the bakery, or getting in up to your eyeballs in frosting.

And you don't need lots of decorating expertise or special pans, said Melissa Barlow of Bountiful, author of "Easy Cut-Up Cakes for Kids," (Gibbs Smith, $14.95).

Barlow came up with the idea for her book "Because I was tired of having to go to the store and buying a special character-shaped pan when I already had pans at home," said Barlow, who is an editor at Gibbs Smith and has some cake-decorating training. "It was just a matter of figuring out a few patterns."

For her 25 cakes, she uses standard round, square and 9-by-13-inch rectangular pans, or a glass mixing bowl, which most people already own.

After baking, you cut the cake into shapes with a knife, and rearrange the pieces to come up with designs for a fish, a turtle, teddy bear, lion and so on. "You can have a really cute cake for your child or for a party, and it will seem as if you spent a lot of time doing it," said Barlow.

She also tried to simplify the icing and decorating process, so that a large kit with numerous decorator tips wasn't necessary. "There are a couple of recipes where it's helpful to have a decorator bag and a star tip, but that's something you can buy at the grocery store," she said.

In most cases, you can put the frosting in a gallon-size zip-lock bag, snip the corner and squeeze out the frosting.

Her Creepy Crawly Spider cake calls for a decorator's bag with a star tip. "But you don't have to be precise or anything, you just squeeze it out, and it goes really fast. The idea was to have the cakes easy enough that a child could help you do it, or do it themselves with a little supervision," said Barlow, who practiced making the cakes with her many nieces and nephews.

The 2001 Weber State University journalism graduate wrote, "101 Things to Do With a Salad," ($9.95) for Gibbs Smith a couple years ago. Before tackling the cut-up cake book, she looked at other cake-decorating books on the market.

"It seemed like they were kind of hard, they require more skill and used the fondant frosting that's harder to deal with," she said. "In my book, I used simple cuts, so it's just a matter of putting them together and frosting the cake. And I use a butter cream frosting that's a lot easier to handle. I feel like this is a book that anybody could use."