Covering A Cake With Dark Buttercream

When you cover a cake with colored buttercream everyone worries about how the guests will end up with dyed tongues. Not only that, but a lot of certain food colors will make the icing bitter or just "off" tasting.

The best way to avoid a colored-icing overload is to cover the cake in a thick white crumbcoat or a white finishing coat, then apply a thin layer of the colored icing over it. This cake is a good example of this, since I used a burgundy icing for the top section of the tiers and white underneath it.

This isn't a difficult concept so I won't do a step-by-step tutorial...just cover the cake in white, then when you do the final thin coat of icing use the colored icing. The only thing you need to watch out for is making the colored coat TOO thin, since that might pick up some of the white icing in it when you smooth it out. If you refrigerate the cake after the first coat of white icing until it hardens up, it will be easier to cover the cake with the colored icing without smearing the white.


Kara Buntin owns A Cake To Remember LLC, custom wedding cakes in Richmond VA

Just Say You're Sorry, What Does It Hurt?

Every now and then I see people discussing whether or not you should tell people that you're sorry if you can't help them for whatever reason. This conversation gets pretty testy, which I think is dumb.

"I never say that I'm sorry, I'm not sorry so why should I say it?" Someone always comes up with that gem. This one is usually in response to someone saying that they can't afford to pay the price of your cake, so you have to tell them that you can't help them. The person making the cake is insulted that the client doesn't want to pay their price, so they refuse to say "I'm sorry" when telling them that they can't make their cake.

Then there's the client who's just randomly calling asking for a 3-D tableau of the battle of Gettysburg, and they need it tomorrow. "Why should I say that I'm sorry that I can't do that" people gripe..."They're just stupid to think that anyone can do that, why should I apologize for it?"

Then there's your garden variety request for a cake that's on a day that you're already booked. Again come the "I'm not sorry..." comments.

Well, here's a news flash. Saying "I'm sorry" doesn't necessarily mean that you're actually dripping with sorrow, it's an etiquette thing to soften someone's disappointment. It's like when you say "It was nice talking to you" when you've just been trapped in conversation with someone really boring at a party and you're trying to escape. Maybe it wasn't nice talking to them, but I would hope you're not going to tell them that.

Sometimes, of course, you really are sorry that you can't help the person out. I tell people "I'm sorry" all the time for politeness, but sometimes I really do mean that I'm sorry I can't save them from a supermarket cake for whatever reason. But even if I don't feel terrible about something it's not a big deal to be polite.

So get that big old chip off your shoulder and opt for being polite. So what, who cares?


Kara Buntin owns A Cake To Remember LLC, custom wedding cakes in Richmond VA

Craftsy Class Review: Advanced Fondant Techniques

This Craftsy class addresses some "advanced fondant techniques," or basic ones, depending on what you've done before. Like most Craftsy classes, this is more of a beginner to intermediate course so don't let the "advanced" description fool you, it's better for beginners. It also seems to repeat a lot of information in other classes, so if you've taken the Colette Peters fondant class you'll have seen a lot of this already.

Marina Sousa teaches this class, and the first 26 minutes consists of her introducing herself, talking about what brands of fondant she uses, what materials you need to work with fondant, and how to add food coloring to fondant.

In the first section she demonstrated how to cover a cake using a rolled piece of fondant and a lid. (And the thanks that she got for that was someone posting a complaint that she didn't properly explain how to calculate circumference. I swear, I hope they pay these instructors a lot because if I had to answer some of the questions that people post I'd go nuts.) She then showed how to use the advanced techniques of hand painting swirls on the cake and use a clay extruder to make an advanced rope border. Then she painted that. Oh, and the advanced technique of how to stick a dragee onto the cake with royal icing.

The second section was actually something that I'd consider advanced-ish, which was stencilling. However, she did it using panels of fondant and a square dummy, so she was able to mess with the stencils on the counter, not on the cake itself. The advice that she gave was that you can use the same technique on round cakes, but I think that it would have been more advanced to show how to apply a stencil using icing to the sides of a round cake that was already covered.

The next lesson showed the advanced techniques of covering a 2" dummy with fondarific, which is what she uses a lot in this lesson, if I'm not mistaken. She said at the beginning that she likes Satin Ice and Fondarific, but keep in mind that Fondarific has modelling chocolate in it so it's stretchier and easier to blend seams etc. There were a few times that I took note of the fact that regular fondant wouldn't behave the way that the stuff she was using would.

So she showed how to cover a 2" square with fondant, then demonstrated the super-advanced technique of cutting out fondant circles and sticking them to the dummy. Are you kidding me?

But wait, don't answer that until you go on to the next advanced lesson...How to cut out stripes and put them on a larger sheet of fondant, then press them out with a rolling pin to flatten them all out. This technique was a very impatient version of the modelling chocolate stripe-wrapped cakes, and the impatient part results in a wigglier version of stripes.

She stops at one point and says that if you want to get things perfectly straight you can actually try, but that she's just doing this fast. So it's not perfectly straight, which is not very advanced. The final cake looks extremely wonky because the stripes aren't even, and she keeps mentioning it so I know that she knows it looks less than excellent.

The following section deals with the advanced technique of cutting out lace pieces then sticking them to the cake and piping over them.

After that we move along to how to make some advanced bow loops, curlicues and ribbon roses. Then you learn the advanced technique of sticking fondant into a button mold to make buttons! Wowza, I wouldn't be able to figure that out on my own!

The last section is 55 minutes of showing you how to stack and decorate the dummy tiers that she was working on in the previous sections.

So you may be able to surmise that I was not a fan of the title of this class since it was pretty much false advertising. I'd rename it something like "decorating techniques with fondant" or some such thing. If you're a relative beginner to fondant and you want to learn some techniques to decorate cakes then go ahead and watch this class. If, on the other hand, you're more experienced and you already know how to make a bow loop and stick circles on a cake you might want to skip this entirely.

My final review:
Skill Level: Beginner to Intermediate, but mostly for fondant beginners.
Equipment You Have To Have: Cutters, stencils, paintbrushes, etc. Check the materials list, there's a lot involved in this class.
Sleep-Inducing Level: I'm tired anyway but I stayed awake. I skipped ahead a lot because I didn't need to watch her press cookie cutters into the side of a dummy cake.
What It Assumes You Already Know: Not a whole lot...
Unnecessary Difficulty Level Of Methods Demonstrated: Not much, this was pretty straighforward and lacked advanced-ness.
Annoying Host Habits: She was doing a lot of sniffling during a couple of sections, which made me think that she recorded this at the same time as the other class she sniffled through, Other than that she did the "um..." thing a lot but not much else to note.
Level of Helpful Hints Learned: Pfffft....That would depend on your skill level. For me, not a thing, but if you've never decorated a fondant cake before you'll be able to pick some things up. There's nothing advanced about this class, but if you need some decorating basics go for it.

Go to the class here: Advanced Fondant Techniques


Kara Buntin owns A Cake To Remember LLC, custom wedding cakes in Richmond VA, and is a Craftsy affiliate.

Lace for Cakes

gumpaste lace applied and overpiped

There are a few ways to make lace on cakes, including piping, fondant and debossing.

The quickest and easiest way, in my opinion, is to just pipe it on freehand or by using a pattern that you've traced onto the cake. This usually works better with a really small tip, nothing larger than a 2 at the most. Here's a description of the easiest way to do that: http://acaketorememberva.blogspot.com/2011/01/piping-lace-on-cakes.html

Another way to do it if you stink at piping, which is apparently the new trend, is to use lace molds. This is also a good way to get a lot of detail, probably more than you'd be able to if you piped the pattern on.

When you use a lace mold an important thing to remember is that you need to use a piece of whatever you're molding that's thick enough to impress a lot of detail, but thin enough to stick to the cake and not look like a big lump of glop. One way to do that is to start with a medium-thick piece of fondant or gumpaste and press it into the mold, then REALLY press it in, using a piece of plastic wrap or gloves to keep your hands from sticking to it and making it shift.

Some lace molds have a self-cutting edge, but I prefer to use an exacto knife to trim the edges. You can also use it to remove sections that would look good if the cake underneath showed through. The more sections like that, the better the lace look will be.

If you use a debossing method, which just means that you're imprinting the pattern into the icing or fondant, you'll need either an impression mat or a homemade press. Once you have that you basically just press the design into the side of the cake. This works best with a crusting buttercream...Fondant will work to a certain extent but it tends to look better on dummy cakes where you can really go to town pressing the design in. Meringue buttercreams are either going to be too soft or too hard, depending on temperature, to get a good, neat-looking design on them using a press.

You can use an actual piece of lace that has a good edge and stitching on it, like a Venetian lace, to impress a pattern into icing. This wouldn't work as well on fondant because the lace itself is going to be too soft.

Once the lace is applies to the cake, however you choose to do it, you can either leave it the way that it is or overpipe it to emphasize the pattern. The square cake at the top of this entry is overpiped around the edges of the pieces. Doing this just emphasizes the texture of the lace and gives it more of a three-dimensional feel.

You can get lace molds in my Etsy shop in the silicone molds section: http://www.etsy.com/shop/ACakeToRemember?section_id=7687858

They're also available through other online retailers, just do a google search for "lace molds" (or "lace moulds" if you want the British results).


Kara Buntin owns A Cake To Remember LLC, custom wedding cakes in Richmond VA

Cake Envy, or Who's Doing Interesting Stuff When You're Not?

How often do you look on facebook and check out other people's cake pages? Does it seem like everyone else is perpetually happy and excited about the cakes they're doing and the work they have lined up? Are you depressed when you watch cake shows that make it look like everyone else is doing super interesting work all the time?

Well, don't worry, because if you pay attention that isn't what's really going on.

Have you seen the studies that show that facebook makes people depressed because they compare their lives to their friends' lives? And that everyone seems to be doing so much better than you are all the time, so you feel crappy as a result? If you recognize yourself in that, you should remember that facebook is a big PR/marketing tool, PR is professional lying, and marketing is booze and guessing.

I've noticed recently that there are a good number of "cake celebrities" posting things on their facebook pages like "no cakes this week, so I'm messing around with display cakes." Or "only two small cakes on the books" like that's a fun thing. Call me crazy, but if I didn't have any cakes on my schedule during wedding season I'd be really worried.

Also, how many of the decorators who were on the cake challenges have gone out of business for whatever reason? I can think of four right off the top of my head who have either closed shop, scaled down their businesses, have changed to teaching a lot as their main source of income, or who have "changed direction" and no longer do cakes. 

Then there's the idea that everyone else is doing super cool designs and you're the only one who gets orders for white cakes with swirls and pearls. Well, I've recently heard a couple of people who are well-known for their unusual and fun designs say that people don't want to pay for those unusual and fun designs, and that the pearls and swirls are the cakes that pay the bills. (I recently admitted to myself that those cakes are easy to do and less time-consuming than something complicated, so I can get paid for three cakes in the time it might take to do one or two. That's a good situation, but of course the orders for the basic cakes dried up as soon as I acknowledged that basic fact.)

So those cake celebrities aren't really doing what tv and their PR machines make it look like they're doing. If they're making a decent living they're probably doing mostly traditional designs for the most part, and if they're not, they're trying to supplement their cake orders by teaching classes on topics that you won't be able to use to make money either. (How many people really order 3-D, stand-up muppet cakes? Yeah, better go pay $400 for that class for something that you'll never have a need to make.)

So if you're convinced that you're the only person who isn't having a ton of fun with cakes all the time, maybe you should stop reading about all the fake fun other people are having. They're probably exaggerating because they feel like they need to keep up with all the other fun-havers. As long as you're booking enough business to satisfy yourself, relax, consider yourself successful, and don't worry about the details of other people's businesses. Because the details that you see probably aren't the details that really matter to the bottom line.


Kara Buntin owns A Cake To Remember LLC, custom wedding cakes in Richmond VA