But delicious cake! What a week it’s been. Between my “What’s for Dinner” day and evening classes and my personal engagements, there was very little time to do a blog last week. So, here’s what I did work on in my spare time. One of my loyal customers wanted 2 birthday cakes to celebrate a few events at a dinner party. You know I love to bake so this was not going to be difficult to do, just finding the time to do the decorating would be tough. But I started decorating it the day before and finished the morning of the event!
The first was a Chocolate cake. It was covered in Orange flavoured buttercream icing, with Grand Marnier buttercream icing in between the layers. I made 2 x 9″ cakes and cut each of those in half so I got some pretty good height from it. I cut thin slices of strawberry and put them in the middle layer with the buttercream icing. The cake was covered in roses using the swirl technique – you have to try this. It clearly made a statement at the event.
The second was a Vanilla cake. I used Blackberry liqueur and buttercream icing to flavour the cake layers and covered it with off-white fondant. If you haven’t used fondant before, the first time you cover a cake in it, you will be thrilled, delighted and will marvel at your masterpiece – if done properly. Fondant hides all your imperfections, the trick is to make sure you have a good “crumb coat” of icing on the cake. The crumb coat is just as it sounds, a base layer of icing that somehow manages to hide imperfections in the cake and keeps the crumbs away from the fondant to reveal a smooth surface finished product. The rest is just sticking on fondant cut out’s in the shapes of your theme – mine was music. Now in my haste to take pictures (I was just so happy with the cakes) I didn’t dust the icing sugar off the black fondant cut outs. The final product (delivered state) was dusted and propped and had the name of the birthday boy on it.
The recipe for the buttercream icing I used for both cakes is below, just add the appropriate essences. Simple, not too sweet and easy to make.
1/2 lb salted butter (225 g) – room temperature
4 cups icing sugar, measured then sifted
3/4 cup heavy cream (add 1/2 at first, then add more as needed)
2 tablespoons flavouring – Grand Marnier, Orange Extract, Vanilla Extract etc.
Whip the butter until soft peaks form – high speed – about 1 minute
Reduce speed to lowest setting, add the icing sugar in 1/2 cup measures
When you have added about 2 cups of icing, add 1/2 cup of cream
Continue adding the icing sugar and flavouring, and slowly add the balance of the cream
If it is too thick add more cream, too thin – add more icing sugar
Voila – it’s ready!
As always – enjoy!
Rose Swirl Cake
Musical Notes