As you have probably gathered by now, I’m not only blogging here to tell you about my creations but to take you on my learning experience as I, hopefully, become better at decorating cakes.
This week I’ve had another steep learning curve…square cakes!!
Now, as this was my first ever proper square cake, I was blissfully unaware at how difficult it is to get a square cake looking, well, square! I used a square tin, trimmed and shaped, used my usual buttercream base, and as I’ve recently learnt, left it to set a little. Then I covered it with fondant and eeeek! it was not easy. In the end I managed to get a smooth looking cake, but it really was not as square as I would have liked it to have been.
I was actually quite pleased with how smooth it came out, and I used a spirit level to show me that it was, almost, perfectly level. For some reason I do tend to make lopsided cakes, so this was a big achievement for me. But I could not get the corners to look sharp and straight.
I’ve been looking at some techniques on how to get a square cake looking more square, so I’ll give them a go and let you know if they work. So watch this space!
The decorations I had made earlier in the week and I’d doubled them up in case of accidents. Always wise when working with icing, it’s so brittle and breaks easily.
I was faced with two challenges, one was that I needed a photograph for this cake, the other was I needed to write on the cake fairly small and neatly.
The photograph was easily solved, I got one made up. They are quite cheap to get done and mine arrived the day after ordering and I was really pleased with it.
The writing was more tricky. I tend to use ‘writing icing’ for any writing on cakes but even with this I wasn’t sure I was going to achieve the effect I wanted. Also, my recent batch of writing icing had let me down badly by being far too runny and tending to blur when I wasn’t looking!
A little research let me to edible ink pens, just like felt tips but with edible ink (obviously) My instincts where to go for the branded ones, i.e. Wilton, but a little more research told me they were not the best. So I ended up buying a packet of Foodoodlers and they are fantastic. You can buy them on Amazon or Ebay if you are not in the USA.
There is not really much else I can say about the decoration, basically I did the writing on squares of icing and then put it all together. Here is the finished result.
Mostly Cake 