Double Height Stack Cake

Yesterday I attended the double height stack cake course at Cakes 4 Fun in Putney. There was a lot to fit in, in one day...cutting, crumb coating, covering and stacking... and that was before we even started on the decoration. To give the double height lower tier, it is actually two cakes on cake drums stacked on top of each other with dowels holding the weight of the top part of the tier.

 

 

Once the cake was covered and stacked it was on to the decoration. We made the butterflies using PME butterfly cutters and then left them to dry in a folded piece of cardboard so that it gives the appearance of flying! We also made the lovely rolled roses which look great and take a lot less time than proper sugar flowers.

 

 

Finally, it was on to the decorations on the sides. We used brush embroidery for the flowers and also had an opportunity to paint the darker flowers on. The finishing touch was to add the tendrils, these were added with an edible pen but these could also be painted on. When using an edible pen on icing, it is best to let the icing set for a while, hence the reason why there are two pictures at the top, one was taken yesterday and the second was taken today once the tendrils had been added.

 

 

This was a fun course with a very pretty cake as the result! There were loads of techniques to learn and it would have been nice to have even more time to really perfect our cakes.

Cake International

This weekend I made my way up to the NEC in Birmingham for my first visit to Cake International! If you've never been then I'd highly recommend it...although your purse may come back quite a lot lighter!! There were a great range of stalls offering all manner of cake decorating equipment. In addition, there were cake decorating demonstrations, a baking theatre, cake competition entries, a live competition, as well as some hands on areas to learn new skills. During the day I watched two demonstrations including Lisa Slatter from PME demonstrating their dove cutters amongst others and also a demonstration of the Cricut Cake machine. If you've never seen a Cricut machine before it cuts patterns and designs out of paste...it does produce lovely uniform designs but it's a bit of a faff, relatively expensive and is it cheating...I'm not quite sure! ;-)

I also managed to spend far too much money on an array of cutters including a Scottie Dog from Cakes4Fun, flowers from Patchwork Cutters and a Babouska Doll from Cakes by Bien.

The pictures I've included here show only a fraction of the cakes that were on display and some were truly amazing...a great source of design inspiration!! I better get decorating now to use all my new cake tools!! If you fancy a visit then Cake International at the NEC will be back next year...and they're now planning a show in London next June if that's closer to home...this may become an annual trip!