For a fondant decorated cake, Sweet Ruby Cakes’ Trina Thomson uses a toothpick and gel colour to colour her fondant. Photo: Russell Shakespeare Source: News Limited
Roll out the fondant and then roll it over the rolling pin before carefully draping it over the cake. Photo: Russell Shakespeare Source: News Limited
Open up the folds, as though the fondant is a skirt, and use gentle pressure to get the seams out. Photo: Russell Shakespeare Source: News Limited
Use a cake smoother to smooth all over the cake, buffing and polishing the icing. Photo: Russell Shakespeare Source: News Limited
Cut away excess fondant with a pizza cutter before giving a final polish over with your cake smoothers. Photo: Russell Shakespeare Source: News Limited
For a layered cake, take a devil’s vanilla cake and layer it with raspberry cream and broken shards of raspberry meringue, as made by pastry chef Kylie Simpson at Chester Street Bakery and Bar in Newstead. Photo: Anthony Weate Source: News Limited
Shards of raspberry meringue sprinkled with freeze-dried raspberry are good for mixing through the cream and topping the cake. When topping the cake, add large pieces first and make sure each piece touches the cream frosting so they have something to stick to and the cake is easier to cut. Scatter smaller pieces on top to create texture. Photo: Anthony Weate Source: News Limited
Finish the cake off with curls of white chocolate and raspberry. Photo: Anthony Weate Source: News Limited
Kylie Simpson’s finished raspberry meringue layer cake available at Chester Street Bakery and Bar in Newstead. Photo: Anthony Weate Source: News Limited
For a buttercream cake, crumb coat the cake by spreading the top and sides with a thin layer of buttercream, as shown by Melinda Preston from Cake Your Occasion. Photo: Anthony Weate Source: News Limited
Add a big dollop of buttercream on the top of the cake. Smooth around. Let chill in the fridge for at least an hour. Source: News Limited
Wash a large knife or palette scraper in boiling water, then dry it with a tea towel. With the knife hot, hold it against the side of the cake with the handle pointing straight to the ceiling. Spin the lazy susan slowly, holding the knife still and take off any extra buttercream and smooth the side of the cake. Chill the cake for a 2 hours until buttercream is set. Photo: Anthony Weate Source: News Limited
Again with a hot knife, cut the extra lip of frosting you created on the top flush with the top of the cake. This should give you a sharp edge. Refrigerate cake for another hour. Photo: Anthony Weate Source: News Limited
The cake is now ready to be topped with ganache. To do this, pour the hot ganache over the middle of the cold cake, letting it naturally drizzle down the sides. Once the ganache is set, decorate with edible flowers, cherries and meringue drops. Photo: Anthony Weate Source: News Limited
The end result is this beautiful buttercream and ganache treat, as created by Cake Your Occasion. Photo: Anthony Weate Source: News Limited
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It’s not a celebration unless there’s cake, so in honour of Queensland Taste’s first birthday, we’re showing you how to create swoon-worthy cakes at home.
Focusing on three key trends in the baking world – fondant, buttercream and layer cakes – local cake experts
Trina Thomson from Sweet Ruby Cakes (pictured below), Melinda Preston from Cake Your Occasion, and Kylie Simpson from Chester Street Bakery and Bar, give us their expert tips for sweet treats that wow.
HOW TO COVER A CAKE IN FONDANT
1.Cover the cake with ganache (a mix of chocolate and cream) and refrigerate until set. Buy precoloured fondant or colour your own with gel paste, using a toothpick (right). Mix the colour into the fondant by kneading the fondant like a bread dough.
2. Roll out the fondant using a little cornflour. If your cake is square, roll it into a square shape, and if it’s a circle, roll it out to a circle. Roll it over your rolling pin, lift it up and drape it over the cake (left).
3. Open up the folds, as though the fondant is a skirt, and use gentle pressure to get the seams out (right).
4. Use a cake smoother to smooth all over the cake, buffing and polishing the icing.
5. Use a pin to get rid of any air holes. Give it a good polish all over, getting rid of any little lumps and bumps (left).
6. Use a pizza cutter, rather than a knife, to cut any excess away from the base.
TRINA THOMSON’S TOP TIPS
1. If you’re starting out, use a mudcake, which is nice and sturdy. We offer butter cakes for people who don’t like the mudcake texture, but mudcakes are more forgiving in the baking process. Don’t use a sponge; the ganache and layers can get too heavy.
2. Cover cakes in ganache and let set in the fridge for an hour or overnight before covering with fondant.
3. Buy precoloured fondant, or use a gel paste. Avoid liquid food colouring – it's messy and you need so much. Gel is more concentrated – just dip a toothpick in and add it to the fondant. Knead it in like you would a bread dough.
4. Use cornflour to roll it out, rather than icing sugar. Cornflour is cheaper and it doesn’t require sifting.
5. Top it off. Use basic cookie cutters to cut fondant shapes. A spray of stars is really
easy – get some food-grade wire and skewer the stars to come out of the cake. Teddy bears are one of the easiest figurines to make; they are basically balls with sausages. Just look up YouTube videos.
6. Embrace the fresh flower trend. I get big bubble tea straws and insert them into the
cake to protect it from the flower pesticides, and pop the flower inside.
7. Get your tool kit ready. You’ll need fondant smoothers, an offset spatula for the ganache, a steel scraper to keep the ganache smooth, a sharp paring knife, and a serrated knife for cutting the layers. And a rolling pin. and pizza cutter for the fondant.
HOW TO CREATE A BUTTERCREAM GANACHE CAKE
1. Make buttercream using 250g butter, 500g icing sugar, a dash of vanilla extract and a splash of milk or pure cream.
2. Place the cake on a firm cake board that you can serve it on, securing the cake to the board with a little buttercream, then put it on a lazy susan. Crumb coat the cake by adding a thin layer of buttercream all around the cake (above). Begin by adding small amounts with a knife and spreading it by spinning the lazy susan. Use a smoother to give an even finish. Chill for 20 minutes.
3. Add a big dollop of buttercream on the top of the cake (above). Smooth around. Let chill in the fridge for at least an hour.
4. Add buttercream to the sides of the cake, leaving a large lip of buttercream on the top.
5. Wash a large knife or palette scraper in boiling water, then dry it with a tea towel. With the knife hot, hold it against the side of the cake with the handle pointing straight to the ceiling. Spin the lazy susan slowly, holding the knife still and take off any extra buttercream and smooth the side of the cake (above). Chill the cake for 2 hours until buttercream is set.
6. With a hot knife, cut the extra lip of frosting you created on the top flush with the top of cake (left). This should give you a sharp edge. Refrigerate the cake for another hour.
7. Make the ganache by melting compound chocolate into cream (for milk and white chocolate, three parts chocolate to one part cream; for dark chocolate, two parts chocolate to one part cream). You’ll need about half a cup of ganache for a 20cm cake.
8. With the cake cold and the ganache hot, pour the ganache into the centre of the cake, allowing it to naturally drizzle over the edges. Do not try to force it.
9. Decorate with edible flowers.
MELINDA PRESTON’S TOP TIPS
1. Get the buttercream right. A really good buttercream consistency is very important or it will just flop. Beat the buttercream for up to 15 minutes until sugar granules are dissolved.
It should be like a thick whipped cream. If you can put it on a spoon, hold it upside down and it won’t fall off, it’s right. If piping rosettes on a cake, keep the scraps of cake you have cut off when levelling your cake and pipe a rosette on it. If you can hold the cake sideways and the buttercream stays put, you’re right. And use gel or paste to colour your buttercream, not liquid colours to maintain a good consistency.
2. Experiment. Try running the back of a hot, dry spoon up the sides of the cake to give it a textured effect.
3. Don’t poison yourself. If using flowers to decorate, make sure they are edible. Roses are a good choice.
4. Freestyle it. When adding flowers, try dropping them from above the cake and seeing where they fall for an effortless look. Or for a more formal approach, hold them in your
hand first and if they look pretty in your hand, they’ll look pretty on the cake.
HOW TO CREATE A LAYERED CAKE
1. Bake your cakes in a large slab tray, rather than a cake tin. Cool completely, then cut out
each layer using a cake ring.
2. Use a cake ring to stack your layers. Line the ring with acetate or baking paper and stack the first layer of the cake inside. Top the layer with filling (like a raspberry cream) and then crunchy bits of meringue, cookie or fruit to add texture. Continue layering the cake, before topping with a thick layer of the cream filling (above).
3. Using a hot, dry blade or flat-sided knife, smooth the top of the cake.
4. Top the cake with decorations such as fresh fruit, broken meringue pieces, chocolate curls or dollops of fresh cream or caramel, depending on your filling.
KYLIE SIMPSON’S TOP TIPS
1. Have all your components ready to go before you start, and a clean and tidy workspace.
It is easier to work with a cake that has been in the fridge, rather than a piece of really fresh cake. If we don’t refrigerate it, it can break and snap.
2. If you want to use a light-coloured icing, do a crumb coating.
3. When layering, don’t put things in the centre of the cake. I never put cherries or cookie crumbs in the centre, just around the edges, otherwise it tears that beautiful point you get when you cut slices.
4. We cook our cakes in a slab, and then cut out the rings. You get a more uniform height that way. When you use a tin, the metal cooks the cake on the outside first, which is why you get the domed effect.
5. Match the inside to the outside. We try to make the decoration appropriate to the cake – we put meringue on the raspberry one, biscuits on the “cookies and cream”, and chocolate flakes on the “death by chocolate”.
6. Take your time. Often I have to give my staff a time-out if it’s not going to plan, otherwise they can create massive issues for themselves. It’s important to just stop and
take 5 minutes. Getting all the sides straight isn’t as easy as people think.
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