V is for Sugar Veneering

Last Friday, when I saw design three won the blog vote, I was excited . . . but mostly scared. I've carved cakes before, but the results were . . . special. So, I read up on carving cakes, bought my materials and got to work. And boy-oh-boy, this cake was a LOT of work. But here is the condensed how-to version for making this cake:

Three Days Before:

- Buy: (for the cake) eggs, butter, margarine, flour, vanilla, sugar, baking powder, salt, cocoa powder, and milk

(for the icing) butter, powdered sugar, milk

(for decorating) silver luster dust, white fondant, violet gel coloring, cardboard cake rounds, thin dowels, and any stamp with swirls on it

Two Days Before:

- Bake a double batch of killer chocolate pound cake recipe from allrecipes.com Dense cakes hold up best when it comes to carving. So, this cake is perfect, because it is firm (a.k.a. carvable), but isn't dry either. I was able to get three 8" 6" and 4" cakes out of the doubled recipe

- Let cakes cool, then put them in refrigerator over night (a cold cake is a carvable cake).

One Day Before:

- Cut the tops off the cakes, and and nom on them (so they won't go to waste, of course).

- Fill cakes with chocolate buttercream (in the middle) and regular buttercream on the outside ring (it's always best to put white buttercream on the outside, so your fondant won't appear darker than it actually is).

- Stack them (each cake had three layers). Put the first layer on a cardboard cake round. You can make sure it doesn't slip off by putting a dab of buttercream on the round before putting the first layer on. Once you're finished stacking, make sure the tier is even. If it isn't, cut excess off the top.

- Carve them. Now, I'll just have to pause here and warn all you Ace of Cakes fans and Food Network Cake Challenge watchers that carving cakes looks way easier on television than it is in real life. It's messy (you get crumbs everywhere - but not dry crumbs - moist crumbs, which makes for a time-consuming clean--up), difficult ("just eyeball it" doesn't apply to carving), and takes a lot of time. It took me about an hour and a half to carve these three itty bitty cakes.

The worst thing about carving is that if you make a mistake, there's no going back. Unlike sugar, or chocolate, you can't just melt down your mistake and start over again. Which brings me to why there aren't three tiers on the finished cake (unlike the sketch you all chose), and also why the design changed a bit. After carving the 4" cake, I realized I made a boo boo. I carved it too thin, which made it look like the starved sister of the other two tiers. It looked ridiculous, so I ate it instead of keeping it on the cake (what? I HAD TO). At any rate, this is what the cake looked like post-carving.

- Ice the carved cakes with a thin layer of white buttercream, then put them in the fridge for the buttercream to harden. If you don't let buttercream harden, then when you go to put fondant on it the temperature from your hands will melt the butter in the icing (which makes for a disfigured cake).

- While the buttercream sets up in the fridge, get to work on coloring the fondant. A little bit of gel covering goes a long way (don't use water-based coloring, because it's fondant's arch-nemisis - the water in the coloring doesn't get along with the margarine in the fondant). This takes a while, so plan accordingly. You have to make sure the color is well incorporated into the fondant. If you have a bread hook on your mixer, I'd recommend using to for this step, unless you feel like giving your arms a thorough workout.

- Once the color is incorporated, roll the fondant out to about 1/4" and cover the cake. I'd love to give you better instructions on how to cover a cake like this, but I totally sucked it up when it came to covering these cakes . . . and my cake books were NO help. I read once, that if you have odd shaped cakes that need covering, you can cover the cake, smooth all the fondant out, push the excess fondant to one side, then cut it off to make a seam on the side of the cake that is "easy to erase" with a fondant smoother. LIES! The issue with this technique (which is what I TRIED to do) is that it doesn't really work well with smaller cakes, particularly because my fondant smoother couldn't glide smoothly with the angles of the cake. So if I could give any advice, it would be this: roll out more fondant then you think you'd need to cover these cakes (so you have plenty of room for the fondant to gather BELOW your cake), then cover them the old fashion way (lay the piece of fondant over the cake, smooth it out with your hands, and cut the excess off the bottom).

- Mix silver cake paint. This is a simple combination of luster dust and a low sugar/high alcohol content liquor (I use vodka). You can add gel coloring to get darker colors if you need to, but most of the time the luster dust does the trick. You can buy basic colors of luster dusts at Hobby Lobby, but you can find a wider range of colors at cheftools.com

- A third of the way down, paint a curvy horizontal line around your cake. From that line up, paint the cake silver. Don't worry if paint strokes show up, you'll erase them in a second.

- Wait about a minute (so the paint starts to dry, but isn't dried completely), then stamp on top of your paint.

The rubber will lift the paint off the fondant, making the design appear in the color of the fondant and making it look like you took forever to paint it this way.

Make sure to wipe off your stamp before stamping again, so you don't get silver paint where you don't want it).

- Finish the cake by painting silver vertical stripes where you didn't paint before (from your curvy line down). Paint dots in between every other stripe (to get the perfect dot, use a Q-tip).

- Create a swirly word cake topper by putting fondant through a clay press with a circular attachment to get long, shoelace-like pieces. Form words by twisting the pieces.

- What you'll end up with is (hopefully) something similar to this (minus the tall flowers).

Be sure to give it to someone you love too. I did, and she loved it.