I had everything finished except for the decorative stripes by the end of Thursday night. I knew I’d have only until 3pm on Friday to finish up before we needed to both be dressed, packed, and have the car loaded to head straight to the wedding site. We got up at 8am, and I thought, “Surely 7 hours is more than enough time to put a few stripes on a cake, right?” You see where this is going.

I got up and immediately got to work setting up the dining room with everything I’d need to get it done.

The first item of business was to continue dying that piece of fondant navy blue with the two extra bottles of dye I’d gone out for the day before.

I’m gonna go ahead and show you this totally unflattering photo of me still in my pajamas just so you can see how rapt Lucas was with the swishy noises my gloves were making while I was kneading the fondant.

I am so glad I decided to buy two extra bottles of dye, because I used every last drop of both of them and even still I wish I had been able to get it a bit darker. Really, I needed a drop of black to make it the right shade of navy, but I got it close. I spent a solid hour adding dye and kneading it in and then even more time kneading in cornstarch to dry the fondant out a bit since all that dye made it a little too sticky.

Then, I had to clean up the area, re-dust it with cornstarch, and roll out the fondant. I had Jeff do some quick math for me to figure out how long I needed to make the stripes by determining the circumference from the diameter. Stay in school, kids.

The largest tier needed stripes over a yard long! I had a lot of trouble with the stripes breaking as I was adhering them. I did my best to get the longest pieces possible onto the front of the cake and then fill in the back and try to hide the seams. Turns out the surface of my table was uneven and it kept making uneven stripes when I tried to cut on it. I lost a lot of time re-rolling and re-cutting to get a nice even thickness.

I also spent a lot of extra time trying to make the stripes perfectly parallel. I realized after the wedding was over that I should have made templates to line the stripes up against for perfect lines. Now I know.

To adhere the stripes, you just brush the surface with a little water, being careful not to let it run. The water partially dissolves the fondant sugars on the surface, which then dissolve and bond with the sugars in the stripes. I had lot of trouble with the dye from the stripes running slightly and making a bit of a blue halo. I spent a huge chunk of time blotting it with paper towels to absorb the excess moisture, and then literally shaving the smeared dye off with an exacto knife. You’re starting to see where that 7 hours went now aren’t you?

Here’s an example of that “elephant skin” effect I was talking about last time. It’s sort of wrinkly and cracked looking. This happens when either the fondant is too dry or has been handled too much. In my case, it’s the dryness from having to use cornstarch to keep it from sticking to the table. For my next cake I’m going to invest in an oversized silicone mat to roll fondant out on. You don’t have to use cornstarch with one of those, reducing the possibility of unsightly elephant skin.

The whole time I was busy finishing the cake, Jeff was busy getting everything possible packed and in the car so we could head out ASAP. I finished with about an hour to spare, just enough time to get myself showered and dressed and pack the the last of my stuff up. We both carried the cake tiers out to the car and secured them in the back, then headed off on our 2+ hour drive to Lafayette, GA.

We got to the wedding site about 2 hours before the rehearsal was set to start. I immediately got to work stacking the cakes on the wooden pedestal the wedding site provided for me. I used a paintbrush to brush off the excess cornstarch from the outside of the cake. Then, and this will sound really weird, I brushed the entire cake with a thin layer of shortening. I did this because the fondant had gotten dried out from the cornstarch and I needed to add some moisture back. Shortening helps to smooth out cracks and imperfections, but at the cost of making the cake shiny. I hoped that it would dry out a bit in the fridge before the wedding the next day.

On Saturday, the wedding day, all the wedding party needed to be at the site by 3pm for group photos. I spent this time putting the final touches on the cake which would need to be brought out at 5pm just before the ceremony started. I was so tired! (BTW, I chopped all my hair off! It was not cooperating that day though with all the heat and humidity.)

There was a bit of stress the previous day because some extra flowers had been saved for me to decorate the cake with, but they were all refusing to open. Luckily, they somehow all magically bloomed overnight and I had plenty to work with.

I put a silver “T” for Tucker on top and used some leftover boutonniere pins to pin a few roses just underneath it. The last step was to adhere the bow. I took all the pieces out and shaved off excess material with an exacto knife, then stuck them to the cake with a little water. One of the bow tails cracked as it draped over the edge of the cake, so I made a paste out of cornstarch and shortening and painted it into the crack. You would never know it was damaged.

This is not the best picture ever, but you can see what the finished bow looked like when all the pieces were laying next to each other.

That’s it for all the prep work. Next is the wedding and the finished cake!

June 26, 2012 Alayna Discussion 17 comments

I LOVE baking, I LIKE crumb coating and frosting, but I HATE working with fondant. This stuff is so finicky and delicate and heavy and sticky. One wrong move and you’ve ruined it, and this stuff ain’t cheap. There really is no room for error.

My trials with fondant began early in the week when I decided to go ahead and dye a piece that I would later be using to make striped trim around the cake. I needed to get this small chunk of fondant to a deep navy blue, and after an entire bottle of navy gel dye and a half hour of kneading and squeezing, I still had only this…

That’s decidedly not navy. It was obvious that I was gonna need a LOT more dye to reach the deep color I was looking for, so I knew I’d need to schedule time during the week to make another trip to the cake supply store for more dye.

BTW, if you’re in the Atlanta area and are in need of professional cake decorating supplies, I cannot recommend Cake Art enough. I could not believe there was an entire store dedicated to cake decorating that was only a few miles from my house. Their staff is extremely helpful and I would have been in serious trouble if I ever found myself in need of more supplies that I could only find online. They even have classes!

Anyway, since I couldn’t finish that project that day, I moved on to creating a bow ornament out of fondant. I can never find my preferred brand of fondant; Satin Ice, in small quantities, so I purchased this Pettinice brand instead in a 1.5 pound size. The thing about Pettinice is that it’s a lot stickier and bendier. I needed to firm it up a bit so that it would hold it’s shape well for making the bow, so I added corn starch in small batches until it felt like the right consistency.

I rolled a small piece of it out on a SilPat (non-stick silicone mat) and used an exacto knife to cut out the shapes for each part of the bow. I then made some pleats in the tails and stuffed the loops with some saran wrap so they wouldn’t flatten out as they dried.

I set them on their own little board and let them set up in the fridge.

Now here’s the real fun part – covering the cakes with the fondant.

You want to first measure your cake to see how large you need to roll out the fondant. You measure across the diameter and up the sides, then add a few inches to make sure you have enough to work with. My biggest cake layer needed a circle of fondant nearly a yard across! It barely even fit on the table.

The professionals use a kind of giant pasta roller machine to make fondant sheets of a perfectly even thickness, I used my biggest heaviest rolling pin and went to town. I had to use a lot of cornstarch to keep the fondant from sticking to the table or to the rolling pin. You constantly need to be running your hand underneath the sheet to make sure it’s not sticking anywhere, and add more cornstarch if it is.

If you find any air bubbles you can pop them with a pin then roll over them a few times to squeeze the air out and smooth out the scar. Keep rotating the fondant to make a nice circular sheet. Use a yard stick to see if it’s big enough. If it’s not big enough and you’ve already got it rolled paper thin, you might have to wad it up and knead in more fondant, then start over. It’s a pain, and I got lucky this time that I had enough to work with for each layer. I still don’t know how many pounds of fondant are needed to cover different sizes of cake.

Here’s the part that absolutely kills my nerves. First, there’s getting it onto the cake without stretching or tearing it. My favorite way to do this is to put both of my arms underneath it with my palms facing up, and then lift it straight up and place it straight down on the cake. Professionals usually roll it around a rolling pin and then unfurl it across the cake. I don’t do this because I’m clumsy and because rolling the fondant when you’ve worked a lot of cornstarch into it can cause a wrinkly surface texture known as “elephant skin.” I’m looking into getting a huge silicone mat to roll out fondant on so that I won’t have to use cornstarch anymore. That’ll take care of the elephant skin problem for good.

Once you get it on the cake, you need to work quickly to smooth the fondant over it seamlessly before it starts to dry out and become less pliable. This is definitely a skill that needs to be practiced to be mastered, and I am nowhere near mastering it. You can start by smoothing it across the top, then the technique is to lift the curtain of fondant up and, starting towards the bottom of the cake, you smooth it upwards with your hand. You have to keep lifting and smoothing until it’s all tucked in. Really difficult because there’s more material hanging over the edge of the cake than there is surface to smooth it onto.

That’s it almost finished, just a few more wrinkles to lift and smooth. At this point you should use a smoothing tool to get the angles really crisp. It’s basically a flat piece of plastic with a handle that you run all over the cake with light pressure. You then run it up and down the sides to make a sharp edge at the bottom. Then you can cut the excess fondant off with a pizza cutter. I always leave about and inch extra though because fondant can tend to shrink up a bit in the fridge. So once I’m sure it won’t shrink anymore I go back with an exacto knife and cut it right at the edge.

The last thing I had to do before decorating was to add the support rods. Cake is heavy. I buy these plastic dowels and then cut them to size.

You want them to come right to the top of the fondant. Any higher and you’ll see a gap between the tiers, lower and the tier above will squish the one below. It takes a lot of adjusting to get each dowel the exact height it needs to be. You can see below that the dowel on the right needs to lose about a millimeter off the top. You wriggle it out, wipe it off, and carefully trim the edge with scissors. I finished this up around 11pm.

All that’s left to do is to decorate it and transport it to the wedding site!

Little did I know just how crazy my last morning of work on the cake would be…

June 25, 2012 Alayna Discussion 14 comments

If you’d like to follow along with the whole process: Check out how I made the strawberry jam filling, watch me work with fondant, add the finishing touches, and see the finished cake!

So that was the jam, but I also used Monday to whip up 6+ pounds of buttercream frosting. Sounds like a lot, but it’s actually really quick and easy to make, only I had to do it in 3 batches because it wouldn’t all fit in the mixer at one time.

For a 2 lb. batch of vanilla buttercream which can be multiplied easily…

Now, I normally wouldn’t touch shortening with a ten foot pole for my baking projects, but it is absolutely invaluable for frosting cakes that may be exposed to hot, humid weather for long periods of time. This is; of course, a major concern in Georgia, and sure enough Caitlin’s cake ended up sitting out in the 80+ degree weather for a few hours before it was cut into. The fondant on the outside of the cake suffered a bit, but the buttercream inside refused to melt. Shortening may be unhealthy, greasy, and take away some of the rich butter flavor of an all-butter frosting; but while it may start to get glossy in the heat, it just won’t melt. And you know, the finished frosting tastes really good too, so I’m not going to complain.

Anyway, the next day I got to baking the cake layers so I’d have somewhere to put all that frosting and jam. For the next few days, I only got pictures of baking the biggest tier, and frosting the smallest tier; so though the pictures below happened on different days they’ll still give you the idea of the flow of things.

I used the same vanilla cake recipe as last time because it’s really simple to prepare, it makes a sturdy and durable cake, and it has a rich buttery flavor. It’s a little denser than a typical wedding cake, but I personally enjoy the texture. It just tastes and feels more homemade.

Here’s the recipe I use that will fill two 9-inch pans…

My Favorite Vanilla Cake

Ingredients

• 2 sticks room temp. unsalted butter
• 2 cups white sugar
• 4 large room temp. eggs
• 4 tsp. vanilla extract
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 and 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1 cup room temp. milk

Cooking Directions

1. Butter and flour two 9-inch baking pans and set aside.
2. Cream together butter and sugar until pale and fluffy.
3. Add vanilla, then eggs one at a time, mixing between each addition.
4. Sift together flour and baking powder and add to batter in 3 additions, mixing between each.
5. Slowly pour in milk while batter mixes on lowest speed, then beat on medium-high for several seconds to fully incorporate.
6. Pour into baking pans and spread evenly with a spatula. Bang bottom of pans on a hard suface a few times to bring any air bubbles to the top of the batter.
7. Bake in a pre-heated 350 degree oven for 40 minutes.
8. Allow to cool in baking pans until pans cool enough to handle, then turn out onto cooling racks and allow to come to room temperature before use.

This recipe can also be halved, which comes in handy for the smaller tiers of cake which use one and a half batches to fill two 6-inch pans.

So after the cakes are completely cool, they get a haircut. The puffy muffin tops get sliced off and the brown crust is removed from the undersides of any layers that face the center of the cake.

My favorite way to do this is to use a small pairing knife first to make an incision all the way around the cake, then I take a longer knife and sweep towards the middle from all sides until the muffin top slides right off. At this point you should break off a slice of muffin top and slather it with frosting so you can “test it for deliciousness.”

As you can see above, the bottom layer is on a round of cardboard for ease of moving it around and for added stability.

For the smallest tier of cake, I was able to just bake two really tall layers and slice them each in half for 4 total. I wouldn’t try this trick with the bigger layers though, they’d be too heavy and flimsy and just break apart. It’s hard enough to move them around without breaking as it is.

Time to frost! I decided to get all fancy and purchase a cake decorating turntable this time around. Best $20 I could have spent. It made frosting so much easier and I’ll definitely still get use out of it for other baking projects throughout the year.

Layering with more frosting, a big dollop of jam, and piled high with yet more frosting to start the crumb coat…

The crumb coat is a thin layer of frosting that helps to seal in the moisture and crumbs. It keeps your cake fresh and spotless. You basically just glob on frosting all over, then use either an offset spatula or scraper tool to scrape it all back off. This is also when you want to pay attention to how your cake layers are lined up; once you put it into the fridge for the buttercream to crust up, there’s really no more moving them around.

After about about an hour in the fridge for the buttercream to crust (become slightly hard and crispy) I took it back out to frost. It’s the same technique as the crumb coat, only you apply less pressure when removing the excess frosting to leave more behind. At this stage you want to work to get the frosting as smooth as possible. Here mine is crusting up in the fridge. It’ll get one more polish with the scraper once it hardens to remove the last of the imperfections.

I also went ahead and made some bases for each layer to sit on out of some foam board from a shipping container and covered them in foil. Right now, this is the best solution I have for transporting my cakes undamaged. We have some plastic angled bracket things that velcro to the fabric material in the back of my car and we use those to corral the cake bases in place. They’re secured to the bases by a bit of double-sided tape. That makes it easy for me to pry them up, but hard for them to slide around.

So that’s it for the frosting. Next time we talk about my mortal enemy – fondant. My eyes are rolling back in my head just thinking about it.

June 22, 2012 Alayna Discussion 90 comments