Cake decorating: A Journey

So I am planning on making my own wedding cake, but my God I have no experience in making traditional 'adult' cakes (you know, cakes that aren't from the Womens Weekly Kids Party Cake Book). So I am now the self-dubbed cake maker for my collegues at work when we have birthday celebrations. I've been doing this the past 10 months or so. Here are some that I've made:

Shall we critique them?

Cake 1: Happy Birthday Laura

This cake was my first attempt at an 'adult' cake (that I am willing to show anyone). The marbling was actually a side effect of trying to do some cool string drip n drag art on the top. I scrapped it off because I really didn't like it. Maybe I'll have another play with this in future and look up some tutorials. The chopped off edge was due to a malformation of the cake, worked into the design, flawlessly I may add ;) The drip needed to be thicker to reduce pooling at the base. The base icing was actually strawberry flavoured. You can find an approximate recipe for it here.

Cake 2: Brown and White Drip Cake

Again the drip needed to be thicker, but it was getting better. When making buttercream icing, use butter, not margerine. This causes the layer to be too soft and you can't get a nice finish on it (note the puffy collapsing edge). I spent AGES trying to make it smooth. The hatching in the top is just melted white choc drizled with a fork.

Cake 3: Strawberries and Cream

Aheh, you know how you think things are in a few days, but it turns out they're tomorrow? Well when you run out of time, run down to woolies and grab a mud cake. Decorate it all pretty like using whipped cream and strawberries (this will also mellow out the crazy rich chocolate flavour) and everyone will compliment you on it! Winning! The strawberry roses were tricky, but fun (and I ate the less-ideal ones ;) ) which I learnt to do by watching this video.

Cake 4: Red Velvet Swiss Roll

My goodness this was tricky. All was going well until I tried to unroll it to add in the filling. I used the recipe on Sally's Baking Addiction but it still cracked :( I might have to try the Pinterest trick of making small cuts on the roll before rolling it up initially... To cover up the cracks I added melted white chocolate. It looked really cool, but made the cake waayyy too sweet (and hard to cut). Would I do it again? Yes I would.

Cake 5: Pretty in Pink

This cake nearly ended up in the bin. I was trying to make a 3 layer cake. the first layer worked out beautifully. The second layer seemed cooked, but fell apart, raw, when I tried to turn it out. The third layer broke into pieces andbasically broke my heart. I was ready to make a whole new cheesecake instead. But I perservered and glued the pieces together using buttercream. In the end, you couldn't tell, even when the cake was cut.

I'm actually really proud of this one. I used butter for the base buttercream and then margerine for the outer layer (as I had run out of butter). I had a go at marbeling the buttercream by putting splotches of pink and white around it. I think they needed to be thinner so I didn't have to spread it out so much and make the colours mix as much as they did. Still looks cool though. The piping I scraped some pink icing on the edge of the piping bag and filled the rest with white to get the cool 2-toned effect.

Conclusion

I am growing in my confidence as a baker and cake decorator! I have been learning new skills, quick patches and slowly upgrading my equipment. I can't wait to try out the baking strips I bought recently! (the ones you put around a cake pan to help the cake rise evenly).

Till next time,

Bake on!