The Dukes of Marzipan: How NOT to cover a cake.

Hi, I'm Rae, the other baker on this blog and I'm here to show you my first attempt at covering a weird shaped cake.

I have covered many a round cake, and many a mini cake, all to varying degrees of success but they've all been fairly presentable.

Today however, I was, for whatever reason, trying to cover a cake in the shape of a lower case 'e'. Here is what happened.

So I started with two chocolate and baileys sponge cake which I had whipped up the day before using a very simple quick mix sponge recipe.

(4oz self raising flour

4oz butter/margarine

2 eggs

1 tsp baking powder

4oz caster sugar

1tbsp cocoa mixed with 1tbsp boiling water

Mix it all up and add some baileys)

I leveled the two cakes and sandwiched them together with a vanilla buttercream. I then applied the template I had made for the 'e' to the cake and carved around it with a small, sharp knife. I ended up with this:

So far so good. I then covered this with a thin layer of buttercream to give the fondant I would be applying something to cling to. Thus:

At this point I made a very rudimentary, yet damning mistake. Pay Attention fellow cake decorators:

CHILL THE CAKE!

Before you even think about applying fondant, give the cake half an hour in the fridge just to let the buttercream set again. If you don't, well... you'll see.

Well, I didn't chill my cake. I went straight on to colouring and rolling out my fondant. I had planned to try and cover this cake all in one but failed straight away when I dropped my rolled out fondant straight on the cake. So I ended up cutting the gaps out and going back and filling them later with scraps of fondant.

This is where I encountered the problem I had caused myself. Because the buttercream was soft, the icing was bulging where the buttercream was moving underneath the fondant. This would not happen if I had chilled it. (Are you getting the idea that chilling is GOOD? I thought so.)

Anyway, after lots of fiddling and a few muttered swears I had covered it to the best of my abilities. This is the finished product. Thank god it was just a practice cake and not for an event.