Fondant, Tiered Cake, and Petunias!

In the second cake decorating course, we made two cakes. Luckily for me, my sister's birthday coincided with the first cake! Once again, I made a gluten free chocolate cake. This cake was made in a 13x9 pan, cut in half width-wise to make a smaller 2-layer rectangular cake. Filled with chocolate and dirty iced, I brought it to class ready to learn how to cover it in fondant. Except, I already knew how to cover a cake in fondant! I learned some good tips on how to work the fondant so it doesn't tear--such as cutting off the excess immediately so that it doesn't pull downward and using piping gel as a glue around the bottom edge. The cake was decorated with fondant ribbons and bows to look like a pink and white birthday present. (Oddly, I have no picture of this cake!)

Perhaps my favorite part of the second cake course was learning how to make flowers on the lily nails. A lily nail is a little cup that gets covered in foil, punched with little holes for drying, and royal icing is piped on to form a lily, petunia, morning glory, or poinsettia. After the flowers are dry, the foil is pulled away from the icing, leaving a hard sugar flower. To add more glitz to the flowers, I sprinkled a few with edible cake glitter before they dried.

For my final project in the class, I made a two tiered cake covered in peach and orange petunias. One thing that I learned about baking tiered cakes is that when it comes time to level the cakes, be sure that all the layers are the same height or at least add up to the same height. I found that I didn't trim enough off the top tier, and it was taller than the bottom tier. This created a visually confusing scene. After dirty icing and covering the cakes in fondant, I placed four small dowels in the cake to support the top tier. Once the top tier was in place, a long dowel with a pointed tip is driven down into all the layers to hold it together. Technically, what I made was a "stacked" cake, which is much more stable than a traditional tiered pillar cake. Most of my decorating time was spent piping a bead border in a diagonal pattern all over the sides of the cake. Then I piped a ruffle border around the base of the top and bottom tiers. Finally I began adding the flowers. Unfortunately, I ran out of time during class and had to take my cake home incomplete. I finished adding the flowers in my own kitchen and served the cake to my astonished co-workers the next day.

This was one of my favorite cakes--I love the peach, orange, and yellow petunias paired with the diamond pattern, bead border on the sides. It was just gorgeous!