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Cake and Decoration Recipes
How to Cover Cakes with Frosting
- Level the cake, invert it on a cardboard piece (that way it will give the top a flat surface). It could have some holes or other irregularities, especially if it’s a fruit cake. This can be solved by filling it in with a little marzipan or sweet pistachio with a flat bordered knife. Finally place a thin layer of milk pastry dessert with the help of a steel spatula.
- Sprinkle powdered sugar on top of a counter and stretch the paste on top of the sugar, try not to let the paste stick onto the counter, until it’s between 0.5 or 1 cm approximately. It’s much more practical to use a long thin roller to spread it. Extend the paste keeping in mind the measurements of the cake (height and thickness) to have it in the appropriate measurements.
- Roll the paste onto the roller to move it to the cake. Pressure it onto the cake while it gets unrolled.
- Tighten the top and sides of the cake with the paste with your hands (your hands should be covered with the powdered sugar). Cut the extra paste that is left over. If there are any air bubbles poke them with a needle to remove the air.
How to cover a squared cake: Generally, round cakes don’t have very much of a problem when covering, however the angled cakes (squared, rectangular, hexagonal, etc) do. On these corners, you must proceed in the following manner:
Don’t join the excess on the corners, but, on the contrary, push it back and in a downward form on both sides of the angle. Finally cut the excess off.
Where to Rest the Covered Cakes
The cardboard base that we use to rest the cake before covering it is of great usefulness when handling it.
However, after covering the cake, a sturdier surface is needed to be able to move it around without it breaking up or tarnishing the decoration, also for a margin that will allow showing the lower decoration and will be presentable and decorative.
For this we can use plastic or metal trays with worked borders to which you can add silk lace paper with tulle or embroidered sides etc.
Another very useful way of forming a cake plate is that it must be of the same size of the cake or a slight bit bigger for the border to be visible.
The plate must be wrapped with aluminum foil, to do this you must cut the foil in the same shape as the plate with 5 cm extra on each side, stick the aluminum foil with glue on the surface and the sides (if the sides are round, practice making gashes in the margin before gluing them.
To give it more prolixity to the lower part you can glue some aluminum foil a little smaller than the surface of the base.
If you add two wooden rods stuck on the bottom of the plate it will make the handling of the cake much easier.
How to rest cakes of two or more layers: We have different options: the one of superposing the cakes by putting them on top of the others, or using columns or pillars or cubes of steel. These are the options:
- if we’re going to put one on top of the other, the cardboard base of the cake must be of the same size as the cake and must be wrapped. Cut a cardboard base of 5 cm less than the first one, center it on top of the first cake, press on it to leave a mark on it, place brochette sticks that reach to the base around the circle that you marked, cut off the excess pieces and place the cardboard plate and on top of it the second layer cake. Place a pointy stick in the center that reaches to the base of the first cake (this way it won’t allow the second layer cake to slide off). If it’s of more than two layers do the same process.
- Another form is to remove a piece from the center of the cake (a cube or cylinder shape) and introduce a Styrofoam of the same proportion in thickness wrapped in aluminum foil. Thus the cake that is placed on top will be leaning on a hard surface and not on top of the first layer cake which can be refilled with a lot of cream without any inconvenience.
- When using columns, we must first mark the circle and the position of each column (generally 4 columns). We rest these and introduce a brochette stick on each one that must touch the base of the cake; cut off the sticks that exceed the column. we then rest the separating stick and above this the second layer cake. This way the weight of the second layer cake will be on the sticks and not on the columns. Some columns come with legs which are introduced to the base of the cake, making the brochette sticks unnecessary.
- The steel cubes are elements which are normally used to separate the shelves in wardrobes and therefore must be bought in hardware stores. To be able to be used as cake separators we must rest them in the center of the lower cake and put pressure on them to mark it. Remove and cut the cake in that square, remove that portion. Introduce the cube. If you wish you can decorate the columns with glaze or wrap it with ribbons and finally rest the other layer.
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