The trend toward single-serve and minis has taken off even more since the surge of at-home food consumption. So, what are the tricks and tactics when it comes to icing, glazing, and finishing mini cupcakes and desserts?

Unifiller’s partner Boyens provides a world-class glaze sprayer unit, which finishes pastries with a wonderful tasting glaze that helps pastries stay fresher longer, explains Sonia Bal, director of marketing for Unifiller Systems.

“A premium dough uses higher quality ingredients including butter,” Bal says. “The dough may be more delicate and temperature dependent. Accurate control of the dough process is important. Starting with a premium dough indicates that the pastries will be of higher quality. Fillings may have larger particulates and creams more natural ingredients. Unifiller equipment is perfectly suited to integrate into any production process of pastries. Servo piston depositors can portion fillings more gently and repeatably than pneumatic piston depositors.”

Unifiller’s RP depositor has been used to finish mini  cupcake bites with buttercream frosting and sprinkles. By the same account, Unifiller’s Pro and Multistation depositors have been used, with a custom cupcake head, to finish eight cupcakes at a time, while the robotic module can finish six, eight or 12 cupcakes, in shell packaging. The injection and enrobing equipment injects, enrobes, and drizzles snacks and cupcakes. Customers have used the injection systems to inject cupcakes with fruit fillings, custards, and flavored buttercreams.

“Customers really just want more throughput, the ability to offset the limited availability of staff while ensuring that they can produce products at lower cost per cupcake,” Bal says.

Apex Motion Control, specialists in robotics and automation for the baking and food industry, has transformed the cake decorating process with the Dual Baker-Bot decorating line. This provides bakeries with a new way to effortlessly decorate cakes without any added strain, thanks to these collaborative robots.

With its easy-to-use interface, all you need to do is draw a design onto the Baker-Bot’s tablet, then the Baker-Bot can easily handle the rest. This system can create designs ranging from personalized messages to intricate patterns, resulting in endless possibilities. By combining two of these Baker-Bots together onto the same conveyor line, bakery manufacturers can increase their throughput while still maintaining quality and consistency.

Check out this short video to see the Dual Baker-Bot setup in action: https://youtu.be/PIn3yv1NurU

Centralized production

The importance of flexibility in commissary and central kitchen cake production lines has accelerated over the last few years, notes Luc Imberechts, owner of Bakon Food Equipment. He points out that grocery customers are seeing consumers gravitate toward more than just traditional, full-sized cakes, making a versatile line of equipment key in the most modern commissaries and central kitchens.

“One of the trends we see is the need to be able to portion and think about the ways people consume the product,” Imberechts says. “The overall trend of the younger generation at least is being more conscious about the waste of food. If you know a full cake is too much, then the simple way out is to buy a smaller portion.”

Imberechts suggests that commissaries and central kitchens build production lines with a few points of transfer—meaning shorter conveyer belts instead of one long conveyer belt.

Fruit inclusions

Premium fillings often have larger fruit inclusions. Unifiller equipment is ideally suited to accurately portion and deposit all types of fillings and toppings. The unique product SV valve is designed with smooth passages that can portion delicate fillings with fruit inclusions easier and with more integrity than other depositors, Bal says.

Unifiller offers a range of single and multi-piston volumetric piston depositors for spot deposits and spreading fillings and creams on  pastries  as well as several solutions to apply dry goods toppings and injecting into pastries. Boyens also provides a world class glaze sprayer unit, which finishes pastries with a wonderful tasting glaze that helps pastries stay fresher longer