Planning your time as a cake decorator
Wow what a busy week I had last weekend. My very good friend from the Seattle area came down to do a wedding cake for her cousin’s daughter : 6 dummy cakes one was a 2-tier cake, the top tier was cake for the bride and groom to cut, and the bottom tier a dummy. To add to the mix we also made 3 double layered sheet cakes to serve.
My friend flew in Wednesday late afternoon, after picking her up at the airport went shopping for all the items needed, such as cake dummies, cake boards, flowers, ribbon, fondant - we usually make our own fondant, but since the cakes will be only show pieces and were not going to be eaten -- taste didn’t really matter. After going to several stores it was getting pretty late so we decided to get the baking supplies the next day. By the way, the cakes were due to be delivered at 6:00pm Friday night about 30 minutes away from where we were decorating.
Thursday morning we went out shopping to get the ingredients for the sheet cakes. We decided on a vanilla cake for all of the sheet cakes and then had 3 different fillings in each sheet cake the fillings were inspired by the colors of the wedding there was: peach, coconut, mango, raspberry, lemon, white chocolate buttercream . It took us all day to bake and make some of the fillings, we had a few more fillings to make Friday morning. It was clear we were behind at this point but this was her cake so I let her manage her project!
Friday morning my friend made the fillings while I started covering the cakes with fondant – we had one tall 6” x 8”, one 2 tier 6” and 8”, a 12” single tier, a 6” and 10” tiered cake and a 8” and 12” cake. We needed to cover all but 2 of the dummies. As I started to knead the fondant it seemed to be nice and fresh – I was glad for that, I thought it would be an easy day getting all of the cakes covered in no time. Well needless to say about 45 minutes later I was still working on a single 6”x4” inch cake! I couldn’t believe that it took me so long, the fondant kept ripping and tearing in the weirdest places, I thought I rolled it out too thin and then I thought it was too thick, then after talking it over with my friend we decided it was just too cold, I nuked it for a couple of seconds the fondant seemed to work better until it cooled down again. Arrrgh – so my friend took over to see what she could do, she didn’t have any better luck – between the 2 of us we have about 20 years of experience covering cakes, it’s not like we didn’t know how to cover a cake but for some reason the fondant had it’s own mind that day. Yes, there are always days like that. We finally got all of the cakes covered. As I was struggling with the fondant my friend was working on the sheet cakes, she filled them and crumb coated them and I finished covering them with buttercream and piped a simple shell border around the edges. Put them back into the fridge to firm up so we could put them in boxes and have them ready to go. By this time it was about 3pm and we had 2 ½ hours to decorate the dummies and get on the road.
I made some royal icing and we started to decorate: a 2-tier cake that we called the spackle cake, I simply used the royal icing to cover the cake with even swirl strokes with the spatula to create a textured swirl effect. I wasn’t so sure of this one, it just looked messy to me up close but as we put on the silk flower on top it really looked nice. Next was the tall 6” x 8” inch cake, we called the broach cake and it simply had a ribbon around the center of the cake with a broach in the middle. This was supposed to be so simple, but after struggling with the fondant, the ribbon went on and then came the broach – since it was a real piece of jewelry is was quite heavy and it didn’t want to stick, so after a few corsage pins and some frustration it finally stayed in place, next was a 12” x4” single cake with royal icing flowers, this was the most fun cake to decorate, it was piping on a swirl to create a flower, I would say that it would be a nice flat rosette. We then put a small white sugar pearls in the center of each flower.
The other 2-tier cakes were just covered and decorated with some roses and then ribbon and flowers.
But the hardest and longest cake to decorate was going to be the one that was the center piece, it was a 2-tier cake, the one that the bride and groom were going to cut – we left that to the last – we shouldn’t have done that – by now it was 5:30 and we needed to go. This cake was a fun but very frustrating cake it was a ruffle cake but not so easy because the ruffles were upside down. As I started to roll out the fondant we thought it would be best to put in some cal tylose powder to get it to dry faster. Well it certainly did its job, it dried a bit too quickly. So we used regular fondant for the rest of the cake. After rolling out long strips of 1 ½ inch fondant I got a small rolling pin and ruffled one edge of the fondant and then lightly sprayed down the fondant cake layer so that the strips would stick, after putting on the first strip the fondant kept breaking and falling off the cake, my friend came to my rescue, we found out quickly that this was a 2 man job, I would put the strips on, then she would hold onto them and try to get them to stick, then I would ruffle the other strip and apply the next set of ruffles. As we finished the cake we saw that there were several holes because the fondant would droop down a bit so we filled in with smaller strips – that took us longer that we had time for. We finally finished the cake and it really looked great. We then place some silk magnolia flowers on the top and side of the cake. By this time it was 6:10. We had to load up the car with the cakes and the 3 large sheet cakes. We changed our clothes (because we were also invited to the reception) and left, usually the traffic is still thick at this time of day but the elements were with us finally, we got there in record time and had everything set up about 10 minutes before the guests came – phew! That was the closest I have ever come to not being done with a cake, that also was the biggest wedding I have ever done – I sure learned a lot.
The first thing I learned with a project that big it’s very important to manage your time and to write everything down that needs to be done and then organize it into what will take longer than another. For instance – we couldn’t remember what cake size dummies were for what design, we went over that about 3 times we finally got a sharpie pen and wrote on each dummy what it was for. As for the baking we baked as fast as we could, that couldn’t be done any faster we had 2 ovens going at the same time.
Second thing is, decorate the cakes according to the details of the cake, if we had started on the ruffle cake earlier in the day it wouldn’t have been such an intense time, the other cakes were very simple to decorate. We could have done those at the end.
Either way it all worked out. The Bride and Brides mother were very happy with all the cakes, they said it was even better than they ever imagined. The guests loved the sheet cake and everyone had a great time. By the end of the night we were both happy with the outcome, but not looking forward to going back and cleaning up!
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