Mini Cakes
Hello everyone! Its good to be blogging again!
So, I'm starting to branch out into different cake and baking techniques now. I've wanted to try covering cakes in sugarpaste for a while, but I'm not confident enough to cover a large cake yet. So I decided to bake a large square victoria sandwich cake and cut it up to make some smaller mini cakes! These seem to be coming into 'fashion' at the moment, and they are ideal as birthday gifts!
I made these two for my parents (as a thank you for taking me to Cake International).
Once I had cut up the cake's, I then covered them in a thin coating of buttercream, so the sugarpaste would stick to the cake. I then rolled out enough sugarpaste to cover the whole cake and placed it over it, tucking in the corners and smoothing it down with my hands.
You can buy cake equipment called cake smoothers. These are extremely useful for smoothing the sugarpaste and creating a really good finish. I've never seen much point in buying them...untill now! My cakes turned out a little rustic and lumpy as they were very difficult to smooth over with my hands. Needless to say, my next purchase will be two cake smoothers!
I then decorated each cake using more sugarpaste, but coloured it pink and blue. The present cake is made by rolling out a ball of sugarpaste into a sausage and flattening it/rolling it out, so you've got a long piece of sugarpaste of which you can cut strips out.
The rose is made from 10 or so small circles of sugarpaste. I cut these out using a large icing nozzle (I don't have any fancy cutters). You then take either a toothpick or a small ball tool (a plastic tool with a ball at the end of it) and roll the edges of the circles so they are flattened out. This gives a more authentic petal look, rather than a clean cut edge.
It's difficult to explain in words how you make a sugarpaste rose, but it basically involves wrapping each petal around, building up layers, to create a rose. You can find lots of helpful clips on YouTube on how to do this! I'm very pleased with how they turned out!
Cake International
Now all my waffling is over, here are some beautiful cakes from the Cake International show at Birmingham NEC. I hope you find them as inspiring as I do!
This cake is stunning! The basket looks incredibly real!
The tiny details in this beach hut are amazing! It must have taken ages to do, but it was clearly worth it!
This cake was my favourite, its extremely colourful and really detailed!
Thanks for reading!
