Man, I thought all-day-baking Wednesday was hard, but yesterday takes the cake! HA! 😀
Yeah, that really is my sense of humor, sorry.
So you saw that I got all the baking done, and now it was time to carve the cakes and cover them in delicious buttercream. I started by trimming the edges and then removing all the brown crust. If I were just making a birthday cake or something I would leave the brown bits, but wedding cakes are expected to be more pristine so I removed it.
Trimming and shaping the cakes was a task that I expected to take about 30 minutes or so. Ha! Try a few hours! It was warm in our kitchen and the buttercream was getting soft and moving the cake layers around as I cut them, so I had to keep returning the cake to the fridge to set back up again.
The second one was easier, it just decided to behave for me for some reason.
Next up, crumbcoating.
A crumbcoat is a really thin layer of frosting that seals in the crumbs, seals in the moisture, makes a smooth and even surface, and holds the layers in place. It’s essentially edible glue.
First, you generously apply buttercream to the cake.
And then you scrape it all off!
I like to use a dough scraper tool because it has a hard edge the drags smoothly across the cake surface. (This is my favorite part of the whole process, I could crumbcoat all day and be happy.)
These got sent to the fridge to chill out for a while and let the buttercream crust.
Then you do it again!
You frost right over the crumbcoat heavily and then use the same tool to scrape it off again, but this time apply less pressure so that you leave more frosting behind. I didn’t get a picture of the finished frosting though, by this point I was getting off schedule for the next step so I wasn’t really thinking about pictures too much.
Protip: Make sure to get the frosting pristinely smooth as any slight imperfections will show up through the fondant layer.
Speaking of fondant, I am (dis)pleased to introduce you to my nemesis…
Fondant and I don’t get along so well. It’s partially because I’m a little weakling that has a hard time rolling it out thin enough and partly because the stuff is just so delicate and finicky and needs a lot of care to look smooth and nice.
I got it done though, and today I’ll be finishing up the last bits of decorating. The whole thing won’t come together though until the day of the wedding (Saturday) so it’ll be in pieces til then.
I’ll make sure to show the rest of the steps and the finished product soon!
