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So you want to arrange real flowers on your wedding cake. It’s definitely a lot less expensive than using gum paste flowers. There are a few caveats. You don’t want to use heavily sprayed flowers. You want to go through a respectable florist who’s going to tell you the truth if these are organic. It’s great to buy them from a food vendor, as well. They’ll tell you exactly what’s on there.

Rose’s are actually edible. They taste a little bit like celery. I don’t recommend eating them. So what I’m going to do instead of putting these directly into the cake where they could potentially leach out some of the moisture, and leave behind a strange aftertaste, what I’m going to do is put together a ball of fondant-ish. No one’s going to see this part, so it’s okay if it’s a little oddly formed.

And I’m going to press this down into the seam area and this is what my flowers are going to go into instead of the cake. So I’m not going to leave any holes or any weird flavors. I have some needle-nosed pliers here. Actually, I always travel with three or four pliers. Do I need that many pliers? Yes, people tend to walk away with them, so it’s good to always have some spares.

I’m just going to plunge this in. It should go up to the base of the flower. I like to work in three’s at varying angles, not more. We’ll probably get a couple more in on this guy. There we go, I’m going to crunch this, and let’s do one up over here. There we go, so obviously that looks a little bit strange. We want to add some fillers.

This is a Monte Casino, little daisy looking flower. You could use Baby’s Breath, that would be lovely. You can use the needle-nosed pliers. Luckily, these are kind of woody, so they’re going in for me really easily, and you want to put fresh flowers into your cake as close to the wedding as possible. This isn’t something you want to do ahead of time. They will wilt and look very sad on your wedding cake.

There we go, looking cute already. If you are working with smaller flowers, you can add a smaller bunch of fondant to put your flowers on to it with. I like to do more than just the one. So I’ll do a smaller version on the top right here. Roses are snipped very close to the end and we’ll just keep on adding these until our brown is filled in. That is how you put fresh flowers on your wedding cake.

Transcript

So here we have a crumb coated cake and I’m going to show you how to make a swirl design over your cake with butter cream frosting. What I have in here is a Swiss meringue butter cream with a little bit of pink march throughout, and what we’re going to get is kind of a rose effect, because we’re going to make swirls over the cake. So I’ve got a large star tip here and what you want to do is start in the center, let the butter cream buildup a little bit, and then go around the sides and pull it off.

So see what you get is this nice little rose pattern. I’m actually going to cover the entire cake and it’s actually really a fast method, very sweet. See I’m going to keep on tightening up my pastry bag here. And it’s okay if they kind of overlap on each other a little bit.

So I’m squeezing until I build up a little mound in the middle and continue to squeeze as it wraps itself around. As it trails off I just release the pressure and pull the bag away. So again, that’s squeeze, stop; squeeze, stop; get a couple of little rosebuds in there.

I’m going to refill my bag really quick and I’ll do that by folding over the edge. You can also do this in a pint glass if you’re home alone and it’s a little too hard to put your hand around it. Put your hands in here, just going to scrap the butter cream off to my thumb and my forefinger. I don’t want to overfill my bag or it’s going to try and squirt out the top.

Also, it’s going to take so long for me to pipe it all that my hands are going to heat it up, so I’ll lose a lot of that detail that’s in the top of the swirls. So I’m going to squeeze this until I get rid of any big air bubbles, twist the top of my bag, and we’re ready to go again. Let’s do our sides now, and that’s how you put a swirl pattern on a cake using butter cream.

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A really fun thing to do with your cake is to decorate using candy. What I have here today is a very nostalgic wafer candy. What I’m going to do is create a border around the bottom of both of my tiers, doing a little tile pattern. The first thing you want to do is take up wafer, brand name inside, you don’t want that to be part of the design, and attach to the cake to find out exactly where you’re going to be adding your royal icing. I’ll just put a little bit on. In the first row mix up your colors.

This is so pretty for spring weddings or for baby showers. You don’t have to get too anal retentive about not repeating colors or accidentally creating a pattern, because what we’re going to do is go around the entire bottom of the cake, make that pattern, adding a little bit more royal icing to this one. Pardon me, I’m going to turn it for a second and we’ll just tile that over the top. All right, there is goes. So we want them all evenly overlapped.

You should be able to adjust them for a minute or two before they all start to dry. Don’t worry too much if there’s some royal icing showing over the top. We’re actually going to make a border over that. We’re going to kind of spin it around, make sure that nothing jumps out at you as being in the wrong spot, and now we’ll do the bottom really quickly. So we’ve got one spot left, fill it in, and you want to check on it every once in a while, make sure that nothing is drooping down on you, and that is how you cover a cake with candy.

Transcript

Another great finishing touch to your wedding cake is a fondant ribbon and bow.

So what I have here is some very pink fondant. Take it out of its protective bag. This is tylose powder and what that is it’s kind of a gummy chemical that we’re going to add to this. It is naturally occurring. We’re going to need it in and what that’s going to do is give our fondant a little more strength, a little more plasticity and when it dries it’s going to dry like porcelain fairly quickly.

So, I’m just adding about a teaspoon. I will work this, wake it up just like we would wake up our fondant. If it starts to feel really sticky or stick to any of my tools, then I will use fat. This is just basically a hydrogenated vegetable shortening.

All right, lovely.

I’m going to do my top half first so I won’t need as much. This goes back into a bag. Tightly seal it when you’re not using it.

I’m going to take a little bit of the fat just to coat my fingers and knead that into our blob of fondant.

Now you can see it’s really nicely smooth and if I fold it over onto itself a few times those seams disappear. It’s not cracking at all.

So this is an acrylic rolling pin. I prefer this over a wooden rolling pin because it doesn’t leave any wood grain texture behind. It also doesn’t stick too much.

So I’m going to roll this out thin. If you notice right here, I actually have a pasta machine. I have a motor attached. You can do this completely with the rolling pin. This makes it much, much easier. I have it on to widest setting. I’ll pass it through once. Take it down another notch, pass it through again. I’m going to take this down three or four settings so that I have a nice thin long sheet of fondant.

There we go. Actually taking it down just two notches made it nice and thin and definitely long enough to go around our top tier.

I’m going to flip this over so I don’t get any of the weird grain from the back of our ruler. And I have a little pizza wheel here. So, holding down on the edge I’m just going to go straight moving my hand to secure the ruler, but not pressing in so much that it’s leaving little numbers behind.

Now, I’m going to reverse my position and just go backwards.

If I wanted to do a thicker ribbon, I would just measure it out and make little notches so that I could follow along with the ruler.

You want to avoid going back and forth a lot, sawing. You want to go in all one direction. It’s going to give you the cleanest cut possible. Cut off our edges and this can be re-rolled. You want to immediately always ball it up and put it in a bag before it dries out.

So, I’m using the piping gel again which is just basically sugar and gelatin. And I’m going to paint a thin line all the way around over our wafers.

You want to decide what the back of your cake is when you start doing this part because the ribbons actually going to go towards the front. So, I’m not wild about the area over here so I’m going to make this our front. I will pinch this edge down so I don’t want to just squish it together. I want to create a little dimple as if it were fabric, just like that. Pinch that off and that’s good if you’ve got a little helper who can help you but, I’m just going over the very top edge of our wafers.

Now lightly adhere it and when I get back to the beginning, create a little dimple again, and pinch.

Now is when you want to step back and see if anything is amiss.

It’s supposed to be emulating fabric. So, if it’s not perfectly straight that’s not the end of the world but we want it to be as straight as possible of course.

Excellent.

All right. For our fondant bow, very similar process. It got a little dried out on me so I’m adding a little fat.

And once again I will feed this through our pasta machine.

You want your bow to be the same width as your ribbon.

All right, get rid of any odd bits. However long you want each loop of your ribbon to be, you’re going to make that twice as long. So we’ll cut this right down the center and if you want to just pick it up and fold it over you’ll see exactly how long that would be. This is a little too long. But that’s good, that means we can actually have some little tails coming off of the end.

So, what I’m going to do is cut these both at an angle. And the first thing I’ll do is attach the tails. So I’m going to make that little dimple again so that it hangs like fabric. I like using piping gel instead of just water. It holds a lot stronger. If you’re putting something heavy on there like this, you can be assured that it’s going to stay. There we go. One, two, oops. There we go. Alright.

So now with this, even though it’s okay if it’s on an edge like that, I created a little dimple on each side and then join them together. Pinch it nicely and I’m going to let it dry for just a second on its side like this.

It’s all about getting that kind of dimple like it’s a Windsor knot. Okie dokie.

More piping gel and here I’m going to go out a little bit so that the ribbon itself will be attached.

Stick it in a little more, there we go.

And by just affixing the back, we get this really nice loop, open loop area. So, naturally this area is not so cute.

So the last thing we’re going to do is take a little extra of our left over pink fondant. Making a nice little ball, squish it down, and the last bit of our piping gel and we just affix that right to the center. You can press it in so it bows out and there we have a fondant ribbon and bow.

Transcript

Alright, so we’ve got our cakes baked, we’ve got our tier boards cut, and we have some delicious Swiss butter cream ready to go.

So now we’re gonna go ahead and fill our cake tier. First thing I’m gonna do is take some wet paper towel and put it in the middle of my turntable. This is a standard turn table, there’s actually a little nozzle at the bottom here where you can tighten it so it’s hard to move or loosen it so it’s easy. Important to remember in case you pick it up. These do pop out and a 15 pound weight is gonna come crashing down on your foot.

So, I have it a little loose so I can spin it around, my wet paper towel, I have my tier board that I’m going to center here. A lot of birthday cakes typically you’ll just take two layers of cake, put them on top of each other with a layer in between. Wedding cakes tend to have three layers in between, they’re a little bit fancier. The pieces are smaller so people wanna get more of the frosting, more of the good stuff.

What I have here is a cake leveler, it’s kind of a piano wire, that I’m going to slide through the cake. It works great on cakes that are 12 inches or smaller, anything bigger than that you wanna use a large serrated blade. So what I’m gonna do is just drag this through, keeping it nice and flat on the tabletop. And I’ll do it over here as well. And this is when you call out to your family that there’s cake scraps, and people will come to gobble them up.

So I’ve got 2 different offset spatulas here, and they’re offset because they’re got this nice little bend in the blade there. I wanna chalk up fairly high on it so that my index finger is right on the bend there, and that’s gonna give me the most control. And you can play around with these. This one has a lot of tension, it’s pretty hard to move around. Whereas, this longer one is really wobbly. So it’s a matter of personal preference, what you like best. I like to do this on larger cakes, and have something a little firmer for smaller cakes around the side. So you’ll see me using them both.

The first thing I’m gonna do is take a little bit of chocolate Swiss butter cream, smear that on the bottom of the board and as that sets up it’s going to keep the cake from sliding off, which is something we want to avoid at all costs. I’ll start with the bottom. That gets centered right on the cake tier. Constantly cleaning up for crumbs. And especially here. I’m gonna fill it with a chocolate Swiss butter cream. And more is more, you can always take it off, if you keep putting it back on you’re gonna find it takes longer to make so start with a lot, nice big healthy serving.

And the movement I’m making here is kind of like your royal wave, going back and forth with your wrist motions your hand is nice and firm. That way I’m not picking up any crumbs and bringing them back into the frosting. So first I kind of spread it around, and now is when you start to turn it. And when you turn it, that wet paper towel is gonna hold it in place and you’re gonna get a nice, smooth, even, it’s all about being even. You don’t want your cake to be tilted. If the bottom tier is tilted the top tier is gonna be really tilted.

Alright? So we’ve got a nice, straight, you can see where it’s picking up excess so we’ve got it nice and flat. Top goes on here. And a lot of cakes you’ll notice drop off to the side a little bit that’s not something to panic about, you’re gonna fill that in with frosting. I’ve never heard anybody complain about too much frosting on one side. And the same motion.

The turn table’s your friend, let that do a lot of the work for you. Here we go. Okay.

And wedding cakes are typically 4 layers of cake, so I’ve got another layer right here. Again, I’m just sliding it through. And more cake scraps.

So now I’m gonna go on the top, use the top portion of the cake. That way I’m reserving this bottom side which is perfectly squared off and that’s gonna be the top of my cake. It’s gonna make it really nice and sharp.

Alright, so I’m gonna take the bottom of my last tier. Brush off any loose crumbs. And that goes on upside down. And you wanna look over the top, make sure it’s not too far off to the side, otherwise it’s going to come out as you go around the sides. So what I like to do is take a bench scraper. I love these when I don’t have a long handle so that they’re totally flat. Put that on my board just like this and see if I’ve got any cake that is pushed over to the side a little bit.

And you can see right here I’ve got my cake pushed a little bit over, so I’m just gonna manhandle it. Push it off to the side, clean off my fingers, and, it’s all nice and straight.

And now it’s time to do the sides of the cake. And we wanna build them up so they are perfectly, perfectly vertical. And I’m gonna do that with the offset spatula. And I’ve got some vanilla butter cream here, move it close, the further away it is the more you’re gonna drop on the counter top. There we go. And I’m gonna do that same waving motion back and forth, and that’s gonna keep crumbs from joining the outside of my butter cream. And you can do this fairly quickly, it’s actually a lot faster the more butter cream you use.

There we go. And you can see I’ve kept it pretty crumb free. Now I’m gonna go back in and fill in any gaps. And it looks a little crazy and messy right now and that’s totally fine, It’s nice and built up.

So, before I do the top of the cake, I wanna smooth out my sides. I’m going to have my hand on top here and if its got butter cream in there I’m just gonna make a giant hand print. So I’ll move this off to the side a little bit. Slide this in perfectly straight up and down until I feel that tier board we cut. And since we have that little lip around the tier board as we drag our bench scraper around it’s just gonna take off the excess and now more. And if you see your cake through it don’t fret, it’s totally fine we’re gonna cover it, this is just the crumb coat. We’re gonna cover it with either more butter cream in a pattern, or we’re gonna cover it with fondant. There we go.

So you can see how much excess was on the sides there. Now it’s gonna get a little easier. But you wanna make sure this is perfectly vertical. A lot of people wanna tilt it one side or the other, and when you do that you end up with a cake that’s bowed out a little bit.

So I’ll take some of that excess plop it on top, and use the same method as before. You always wanna chill your butter cream before fondanting it. It is fairly soft and if I were to fondant it right now I would get a very marshmallow-y curvy looking corner. I want it to be as straight as possible so I’m gonna chill it.

And I’m just taking off my excess. And don’t be afraid to get down on eye level with your cake and spin it around. Make sure those sides are perfectly up and down and your top is nice and flat.

Again one more time.

And I’m just gonna drag that little lip straight in. Filling in any little gaps. Every little nick, will show up underneath the fondant, it’s not a forgiving medium. Alright so we’ve got our cake all nice and smooth on the edges, our top looks good and straight. So, I’m just gonna pop this in the refrigerator.

And that is how you frost a cake.

Transcript

Today we want to make a polka dot pattern on our wedding cake and we’re going to be using gum paste. You could also use fondant, but gum paste has more gummy chemicals that are in it, so when you mix it together it starts to become more rubbery, more elastic and stick together. If you do it with just plain fondant, when you lift it up off of the table to attach it to the cake, it’s actually going to lose its shape a little bit, and we want to make sure we have perfect circles for our polka dots.

So I’m using a yellow gum paste. I just colored it with a little bit of yellow, and that’s because we’re going to go back later and paint them in gold, and I want them to have a nice base color to start off with. So I’m going to just use a small handful, wrapping up anything I’m not using, and I’ve got a little bit of fat here and that’s just going to soften up our yellow gum paste. To make our dots, instead of using cookie cutters, I’m actually using some tips from piping bags.

So I’ve got an 803 here and I’ve got an 807 and I’ll be using both sides. So you can use these two tips interchangeably to get different sized polka dots. So I’m going to roll this out. You could just use an acrylic roller and your counter top. I like to send mine through a pasta machine, so they’re really nice and consistent, as far as their thickness. Beautiful, so here I have a nice sheet of rolled out gum paste. I’m going to use the thickened first. Really get it down there and you see you get a perfect out of it.

It sticks through the center like that. Just pop a paintbrush down and I’m touching them very gingerly, so as not to distort their shape. If I were doing fondant it would be sticking to the table a little bit more. Gum paste is more cooperative. It’s tempting to try and go doo, doo, doo, doot and have them stack up inside the tip, but they will get stuck that way and will distort and be a pain to move out.

Okay, that should be enough to start with. I’m using regular water to attach these to the cake, but you could also use a piping gel. And we’re just going to be doing a polka dot pattern on our medium tier in the middle here. So the first thing I always say is to look for flaws. I have a little ding here. I want to make sure that’s covered up. This is a perfect opportunity to cover that up and no one will ever know, just like that it’s gone.

If you ever see something funny on a wedding cake, there’s a good chance there’s a ding underneath of it. So the trick with doing a polka dot pattern is spread them out first. You don’t want anything too close together. When you’re working in smalls, work in two’s or three’s. So when I apply these; do one here and have one fairly close by; that’ll be cute.

We’re going for cute and happy, not measly, so it’s all about spacing. If you do have to go back and take something off, don’t if you can avoid it at any cost. If you simply have to you’re going to use either peel it off or scrap it off with a small spatula like this. Also don’t be afraid to cut them in half. It helps to look even more realistic if you’ve got one coming up out of the bottom or from the top.

There we go. See that’s what you want to avoid, two that are very similar to each other. So I’m just going to pop that right off and move it down here. This takes a little practice just to get used to the way it should look, but it’s such a great, cute payoff. And that is how you put a polka dot pattern on a wedding tier.

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A really fun element to add to your wedding cake is disco dust, which is an edible glitter product. What could be wrong with that? Absolutely nothing. So you can see it’s super, super shimmery, really, really shiny. A caveat, when you use this you will be wearing it the rest of the day, which is usually not a problem.

So what I do is take a little bit of piping gel and I put that in one of my cavities of the palette here. I’m going to scoop some disco dust on top of that; you see how it gets everywhere; and I’m going to mix it in with my disco dust making a very sparkly exciting paste. So my brush is filled up. Now what I can do is go back and lightly touch all of my Swiss dots, turning them into a very cool disco dot.

It’s great to let your dots dry a little bit more before you put this on there, but this will work fine for us. What’s so great is that it’s so shimmery and faceted that it catches all the candle light really, really beautifully. So you can find disco dust at cake supply shops and online. If you even just search for disco dust, this is what will come up.

You can get it in a wide array of colors and metallic’s, even just iridescent, which is a really fun, subtle, subtle look to have. This one is a disco pink diamond. And that’s a great way to add a little sparkle to your wedding cake with disco dust.

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So now it’s time to cut and enjoy the cake. The first thing we’ll do is take off our anniversary tier to wrap up and preserve later. I’m just going to put this on the plate here. I’m going to gingerly slide a knife between the two tiers. They should be fairly stuck together and if the cake has been out for the entire reception, there’s a good chance it’s a little soft. So just carefully lift it off. Lost a Necco wafer. That’s okay.

I’m going to leave that on the plate to preserve later. So the first thing we want to do is remove our dowels that protected this tier so well. I’ve got a pair of needle-nosed pliers here. I’ll just reach in, pull these out. All right, now here’s the big secret about cutting wedding cakes. You make a square and then you’re going to cut exactly equal portions.

If you have a tiny cake and you have a birthday party, it’s fine to do slices all the way around, but for a wedding cake you want every slice to be exactly the same. The way you do that is by making this into a square. That does mean you’re going to have some waste, and if you go into the back, you’ll probably find your caterers feasting on the little scraps left behind. There’s a lot left in there and it’s part of why wedding cakes are so expensive as well, because there’s some waste involved.

So the first thing I’m going to do is with a long serrated blade, just go straight down the side. There’s our one outside, which I will discard. It’s tricky too, because the cake has likely been sitting out for a number of hours, which means it’s at its most delicious because it’s room temperature, but at its most difficult to cut because it’s soft. There we go, more scrap.

So now I’m going to go through the center, so I have a nice squared off piece here. I’m going to cut it right down the middle and it’s serrated for a reason. You want to kind of saw it back and forth. You don’t necessarily want to just squish it all the way down right away. So now we should be able to get even slices. I’m going to hold these two together.

The industry standard for a wedding cake slice is that they’re about four fingers wide by two fingers deep and my tiers are usually around five inches tall, so it’s a pretty healthy serving. This is why there’s often a cake cutting fee associated with wedding cakes at venues, because it is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Another server here, and there we go. And that is how you cut your wedding cake.

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A really great way to finish off your cake is with some fun wedding cake embellishments. What I have here are some clay tools. They’re actually– you can fill them in, little cavities, that you can get a great, really highly detailed finish to add to your cake. So what I’m going to do is take some of my gum paste that’s been softened out with a little bit of vegetable shortening.

We’re going to roll a very technical snake. Pop that into the cavity and then just press it down evenly all the way across. I don’t want to use too much paste, because then I have to go back and trim away from the side. So you’re better off with a little less than more. All right? It tends to stick in there, so I’ll just use the Exacto blade to take it out, and you see what I get is this really fun pattern. This one’s kind of like a wheat sheaf.

And I’m going to attach that to the bottom of my cake to make a sort of border, do this around the top. And I’m just using water for this, because it’s going to dry. It’ll attach to the gum paste and then dry completely. I don’t want to press too hard on it or else it’s going to lose some of its detail. I’ve pre-made a couple of these, so we’ll just add them all on together. And again, you don’t want to pool or get little puddles of water, because it will make little divets in your cake.

There we go. I like to look at architectural elements as well, to really inspire cake design. This is definitely something that falls into that category. I don’t need as long as piece to fit in there. I’ll just snip off the end with my trusty Exacto blade. So it’s a great way to do borders. If you don’t like the joining parts, by all means you can make little beads, roll up some circles. It helps it to look a little bit more finished.

The trick is to make your beads all the same size, so I always try to imagine what size this is. These are like small blueberries. It makes it easier for me to mentally replicate them. And I’d like to do a few more little embellishments just to give you an idea of how the mats work. Here is one of my clay mats. All of my designs are a little bit formal for this kind of cake with polka dot, sort of stripey pattern. But when we paint them all gold, they’re going to look really amazing.

Same method I’m just filling in the cavity, not letting it overflow. A little bit of water and I’ll just do four of these. The more formal the element is, the more I think it should be repeated evenly. You wouldn’t want to do scattered architectural elements, it would look a little bit clumsy. Trace it over to the other side. So those are some really fun gum paste adornments.

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So now we’re going to add some Swiss dot’s, a nice Swiss dot pattern to our cake here to dress it up a little bit. I have #1 tip, but you can use a #2 or #3. It’s the basic round tip. You see my Royal Icing bag has a coupler, so I can swap out tips really easily. So the easiest way to do this is to start on opposite sides of the cake. So I’m going to start my pattern about a half an inch from the top, right above the bow.

So I just put one little dot, apply some pressure and stop. Now I’m going to turn it all the way around, so that my next dot goes absolutely on the exact opposite side at the same height down, which is about a half an inch. All right, so now I’ve got just two dots all the way around, but I’ve split up my cake, so now I can add a third dot over here, same height down, same size.

If you end up with a little curlicue or a little peak to your tip, just take a wet brush with just water and you can tap it down, so you get a nice little bead instead. Now I’ll add my fourth line, equidistant between the two and the same height down. Oop, works best if you use sound effects. And now I’m going to add in my missing dots.

Okay, so I’ve got an equal amount of dots. Now I’m going to cut between the two, add right below it, and you can do as many, as tight a pattern as you want. Go back and make sure these are tight. Now I add my last row on the bottom. There we go, so now we have a sweet little pattern of Swiss dots around our cake.

Transcript

We want to make a base for our cake structure, and this is going to be a fondant board. This is a plain, store-bought, really strong, nice, thick board. They’re very, very common. I think they’re a little tacky. If you’re doing a wedding cake, it’s like everybody and their brother can buy one of these, but you want to cover up some of that silver on the outside.

I dust my circular area with some powdered sugar, just like I would do if I were rolling out a fondant tier. Put this in the center. I’m going to quickly roll this out to be the width of the board. It’s okay if it’s thin. Move it around, pick up some powdered sugar if you feel it’s sticking. There we go.

I have some piping gel here; pick it up with my paintbrush. I’m just going to go around the outside, because we’re actually going to cut out the area that the cake is going to notch into. You can find piping gel at any craft store. Lots of baking stores have it. Whenever you get those piping gel pens from the supermarket, that’s what this is; this just has some color added to it. The one I have here is plain. Nice plain piping gel. There we go. Move that out of the way.

I will pick this up and gingerly drag it over the top, smooth it out some. The first thing I’ll do is cut off the excess from the outside using a sharp blade. Pick it up like a pizza, and I’m just going straight down. You can get some pretty ribbon to match your cake design to go along the outside, or you can leave it if you want a little silver accent. This is much nicer than the plain silver board.

Smooth that around with my hand, and cut out the center piece. Grab my XActo blade back. This is the width of my cake, so I’m going to center that. You can just do it by eye, or if you want to get one of these bench scrapers that has the inch marks on it, that’s very helpful. That’s about 5 1/4 . This should be an inch all the way around. There we go. With my XActo blade, I’m going to hold this down with my hand, right in the center, and with my XActo blade, which is very, very sharp, I put a new one in almost every time I use the handle. There we go. Pick that up.

That is a perfect foundation for a cake, and how you make a cake board.

Transcript

A really quick way to make your cake look finished is to hide the seams. The seam is here, you can see where it’s 2 cakes put together, but we want it to look like one giant piece. I’m going to use a rose tip here, which is usually number 104. I’ve got some royal icing in my piping bag. You’ll notice that it’s pushed all the way forward and then spun around, and that’s to keep it from shooting out the bag and covering my hand and anything else that might be in the area. Nice clean tip. You’re going to take the fat end and just go towards the end. I’m filling it in. I know it looks a little crazy at first. I’ll now take my finger and just drag it around, getting rid of any excess. It’s also going to make it nice and sturdy. There we go.

I’ve done the entire top tier. I’m just going to go around and take off any excess. You want to go fairly quickly that it doesn’t bubble up too much on you. Royal icing dries up like cement. It’s what we use to build gingerbread houses, so it’s going to hold everything together really nicely, but you want to fairly quickly go around and clean up the edges. Also, continually clean off your tip, it’s going to keep any errant Royal icing from getting all over the place. You’ll notice I’m going fast, but not too fast. I want it to really fill in the seams.

There we go, nice clean finger. If I go too fast, then it will look a little bit dry, so just keep going back, almost like you were caulking a bathtub. Just fill it in. You can use some of the excess Royal icing to take care of any elephant skin that you might have gotten. It’ll fill in the little holes or any little pin pricks you did to get rid of bubbles. Just brush it in, and it will cover up a host of problems.

There you go. That is how you hide the seams between the tiers of your cake.

Transcript

Hi. My name is Michelle Doll, and I’m a cake designer. I’m actually a career changer. I spent ten years in the graphic design industry, working in corporate identity development, and while that was great, it’s not what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I went to the French Culinary Institute down in SoHo and studied their professional pastry program. After that, I went to work for Ron BenIsrael. He’s one of the best, if not the best, cake designer in the world. I was with him for over a year as a sugar artist. After that, I went to work for a patisserie in Brooklyn called Colson. It’s a Belgian place. I was there for a little over a year, doing both sweet and savory. So it was really nice not to eat wedding cake every single day and getting to stretch my wings a little bit and do soups, salads, sandwiches. We’d be up in the middle of the night rolling our own croissants. We did everything there.

After that, I was approached by Food Network to do a throwdown with Bobby Flay. It was the wedding cake episode, and I won, so everything became about wedding cakes again. So for the last seven, eight years, I’ve had my own wedding cake company called Michelle Doll Cakes. Our website’s michelledollcakes.com. I get to take in all of my graphic design experiences as well as my baking experience and create something perfect for brides that way.

And I’m branching out a little bit more. For the last two years, I’ve been teaching at different culinary schools around the city, both sweet and savory. I teach two to three savory classes a week, and I absolutely love it.

So if you want to learn more about me, visit michelledollcakes.com or send me a Tweet at @DollBaker, and I’d love to hear from you. Thanks.

Transcript

So this is how you do a striped design on a wedding cake. I’m going to use gum paste again, because it’s got the elasticity that I want, and because the stripes that you make tend to be really, really long. And if you do that in fondant and you pick it up the gravity of the fondant is going to pull it down and tear it apart. So gum paste is definitely the way to go. I’ve kneaded it so that it’s nice and pliable. It feels like a very smooth Play-Doh.

The fat that I’m using is just vegetable shortening. It’s kind of counter-intuitive with gum paste. If it starts to feel sticky, you don’t want to add powdered sugar. You never ever add powdered sugar or corn starch to your gum paste. It’s going to dry it out and cause it to crack on you. What you want to add is actually vegetable shortening. It’s the kind of fat that you can use. It’s going to make it really soft and pliable and keep it from sticking to things.

So just like before, I’m going to roll this out, so that it’s thin enough to feed through my pasta machine. All right, you’ll notice that when I move the long piece of gum paste, I do it on the back of my fingers. That keeps it from stretching out too much. There we go, so it’s nice and long. I’ll use again, the back of my ruler, so that it doesn’t leave any strange imprints from the cork side.

And the first stripe that I’m going to do is actually going to be the width of the ruler. When I go up I’m going to do one about half that size. But I want to cut them at the same time, so that I don’t have to re-roll it out. All the way along the top. There we go, so not only is that one stripe, it’s also the top of our next stripe that we’re going to do.

So again using my paintbrush, I want to start off on the bottom stripe. That’s where we’re going to measure from to build up. This is just water. A thin coating, I don’t want to have any droplets or pools of water. They will actually start to disintegrate the fondant and you end up with a very pitted appearance. All right, so that is all the way around.

If you have a part of the cake that you’re not really happy with, that’s where you want to start your seam for the stripe. I’m just being very careful that it butts up along the bottom here. It should fit right into the corner and this is where it meets. So with my Exacto blade I’m just going to follow the cut underneath, and we can just squish it together a little bit, so that it meets nicely.

Now before we move on, we want to make sure that it’s as level as possible, because there are a couple of areas where it looks like it came up some. I’ll just kind of nudge it down a little bit and that looks great. So that is our first stripe. We could leave that alone or we could back and add another stripe, which is what we’re going to do right now. So what I’m going to do is wrap this around my cake, nice and tight.

So I’m going to make sure it’s nicely butted up to the stripe below, and then with my Exacto blade I’m going to go in, and make some little tick marks. I can use that as a cheat sheet later for where to put my next stripe. You can do this with varying widths of ribbon. Right after Christmas, I always stock up on tons of interesting ribbon, so that I have scraps I can use. Here we go, all rightey, okey dokey, so with my paintbrush I’m going to add a thin stream of water right above the tick marks that we made a moment ago with the tape measure.

And again, avoid drips, just a little bit of water, just enough that it sticks. We want our seams to be on the same side. It’s easiest to do this at eye level and let the turntable help you. So I’m going to hold this spot where it goes and simply turn. Okay, now we go back and straighten it out using our little spatula here. Ideally, you shouldn’t have too many adjustments to make and there you go. That’s how you do a striped pattern on your wedding cake.

Transcript

So you’ve had a successful wedding and now you’re ready to save your anniversary tier. What your caterer is going to do for you is chill that top layer. You want it to be really nice, cool, and firm to the touch before you attempt to wrap it up to be saved. Traditionally, you save it for a year, come back and defrost it the day you’re going to eat it. You take it out that morning, leave it on your counter top and then enjoy it after dinner that evening.

But what I find is a lot of couples do is get back from their honeymoon and remember that there’s cake in the freezer and just tuck right in. So what we’re going to do is with our very cold cake, I’m essentially going to wrap it to within an inch of its life in Saran wrap. Okay, so the bow is going to suffer a little bit. When it defrosts it’s going to get really soft and might droop a little bit for you, but it’s not the end of the world.

So what we’re trying to do is create and airtight barrier around our cake. It should look a little crazy. Saran wrap is the best option to do this with. Another thing I like to do if the cake is small enough is to fit it into a large gallon-sized Zip Lock baggie and seal it up after you’ve wrapped it in the Saran wrap. That’s a really great way to keep it really, really and airtight. You also want to make sure you’ve got some open baking soda in your freezer, so that it doesn’t absorb any weird smells.

And on the day you want to defrost it, you’re going to unwrap it completely with the plastic so that it defrosts with just the fondant on the outside. You would do the same if it were just a butter cream cake, as well. And you would be able to wrap up a butter cream cake too, after it’s firmed in the refrigerator for a while. If you can touch it and not leave a mark, not really feel any give, then it’s cold enough to wrap. I’ll do one more layer and that is ready to go into your freezer. That’s how you wrap your anniversary tier.

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We are going to add a clamshell border to our swirl design cake here. I’m using a chocolate Swiss meringue with a smaller star tip. This one is actually number 32. It’s going to give us a nice ridged pattern as we go around.

The trick is to let the butter cream build up, and then to pull away. I’m going to start at the edge here. I’m going at about a 35-40 degree angle, and I just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze and then pull away. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and you can see they start to overlap each other.

You see, I’m moving the turntable more than I’m moving the bag. That way, it’s always at the same angle, so they’ll stay as consistent as possible.

I’m doing this border on the bottom of the cake to really tie it together so it has sort of a floral theme, but you can do this on the top of the cake, around the middle. It’s just a really fun border. You can never get to them to end perfectly. Your best bet is to do a little circle bead and let it trail off at the end.

That’s how, using butter cream, you can make a clamshell edge.

Transcript

Now we are going to assemble a wedding cake.

This is one of the most difficult parts of putting together a wedding cake, and it’s also one of the most important. If you do everything 100% right, but you don’t get this part right, nothing else matters. Nothing is worse than being worried that a cake is going to fall at a wedding after you’ve delivered it. So I’m going to show you the best way to put it together.

We have our fondanted board here and the tools I need. This is a dowel I bought at a local hardware store. I’ve got a little standing block, and this is actually a miter box for dollhouses and a little miniature saw. These are both also X-ACTO products. The miter box will butt up on the edge of a table here so that we can saw our dowel rods to be the exact right size. Some people use straws. I don’t find that they’re nearly strong enough, especially for bigger cakes.

Alright, so the first thing I’m going to do is attach my bottom tier to the fondant board. And I’m going to use a hot glue gun for that, which can feel a little strange. But remember, it’s just going to be touching foam core on the bottom, and we want to make sure that that base is super secure. So I’m using a nice, big dollop of hot glue. Be very careful with hot glue. It’s just like working with hot sugar; it’s not something you can just wipe off.

Alright, so I will tuck this in and just drop it right down. Since my cake is cold, I can manhandle it a little bit, push it around so it fits in nicely. There we go. And we’ll come back and cover up those seams in a little bit. But first, we want to stack our cake.

So, step one is to determine the depth of our cake tier, and I’m going to use our dowel for that. The dowel’s been washed. And this feels a little dramatic, but I’m going to do it by plunging the dowel right into the cake. And I will figure out the width of where to stick that dowel based on the tier that’s going on top of it. So I know that because this tier’s only this big, if I do a dowel outside of that area, not only will it not support the tier above it, it’s going to stick out and be ugly. So I’m going to eyeball measure it so that’s how far apart the tier is. I’m going to center it on the cake it’s going on, and I’m going to go in about an inch to make sure that it’s perfectly supported and not at all visible.

Alright, so plunge it all the way down. Press pretty hard. With a pencil, I’m just going to mark how tall that is and try not to poke my eye out. Alright, now I can move this away for a moment while I cut my dowels. Now, the tier that’s going on top of it is not super big, so I don’t need a ton of dowels. I can get away with five for this one. So this goes into the center. I’m lining up my little pencil notch with the mark. And I’m using pressure similar to nail filing; I’m not pressing too hard. If you press too hard, this gets really, really difficult, so just use light pressure. There is our first dowel. I’m going to mark it with a little X.

So, that’s our master dowel. Line it up with your next guy, mark a little notch, and I will do this four more times. Okay, so, I have five dowels, all the same size. There we go, very nice. So if my cake tier is a little bit off-kilter, not terribly straight on top, having all of these the exact same size will ensure that whatever tier I put above it will be perfectly straight. So if I’m doing a seven-tier cake, by having them all be ensured to be perfectly straight, I’m going to avoid having a tippy cake.

Here we have a sanding block, and that’s just going to help me take the edge off our little mini-dowels. And I’m just spinning it around so I get a nice, nice perfect edge.

Alright, our five dowels are ready to go. I’ll move this guy towards me. Here is our original dowel. It should fit perfect, and that’s exactly what we want, perfectly flush with the top of the cake. Now, to figure out where to put the other dowels, I’m going to take this dowel in, measure the depth which it’s at, and before I plunge them all into the cake, I’m going to leave little marks for where I think they should go. And that way, before I put them in, if it looks like I’ve got a kind of crazy shape or a large area that’s not covered, I can change it.

Alright, so we’ve got a nice little five. Everything is pretty equidistant. I’ll just go ahead and plunge these guys in. It’s a good indicator for how even the top of your cake was if any of these guys stick out.

Alright. so, nice and flush. I’m going to take a little bit of the butter cream, and when it chills, it’s all going to stick together. You can use royal icing as well. If you’ll be transporting it in, say, San Francisco, where it’s going to be really hilly, you’re going to make sure it’s stuck. Here we go. So I’m just centering this. It’s good to walk away, three or four feet, look at your cake, and make sure it’s totally centered. But here we have it. I’ll just chill this, and then we will all come back and decorate it.

And that is how you assemble a wedding cake.

Transcript

So, this pink is pretty aggressively pink. I’d love to give it a little bit of a metallic finish, to blend in with the rest of the cake, it will make it look really nice and finished.

What I’m using is an airbrushed color, it’s actually the Pearl Sheen. You mix it up really, really well, so that all of the metallic sentiments move around in the alcohol. I’ve got my little pallid here. I’m using a nice, soft brush, really flat edges. What I’ll do is start underneath here, and I’m just going to go back and forth. It’s nice. It’s a really thin paint, so it will give it a subtle, metallic texture. You don’t want it to load up so much that you drip anywhere.

Always left to right, never up and down. Unless all you’re doing is up and down. It’s kind of like crayons, you don’t want to disrupt the pattern. It’s good, because we want this to look like fabric. So this is going to give it a silky finish.

If you do get some on your cake, on the plain fondant, you can go back later with a wet Q-tip, and it will come right off for you.

I’m going to leave the inside of our ribbon mat, and that’s actually going to make it look a little bit more realistic.

And just like that, you have a metallic finish on your fondant ribbon.

Transcript

So we want to paint with gold our embellishments on the cake. It’s going to make them really pop, give a really nice, sophisticated air to the cake. I’m using some vodka. The reason you want to use alcohol and not water is because alcohol evaporates really, really quickly. So we can make a paste and our gold will set up. You always want to start with the alcohol. You don’t want to add your alcohol to the gold luster dust.

What I have in here is gold luster dust. You can apply it either dry, almost like as if it were eye shadow. That’s pretty awesome or you can mix it with the alcohol and make a paint. I’m going to show you how to do it both ways. First, I’ll take a little bit out from the table here. I’m going to grab a dry paintbrush and just like if it was makeup I fill my brush up.

The problem with applying gold this way is that it can drop down a little bit as you’re going. So you have to be okay with having some gold flecks all over your cake. It’s also not going to be as heavy a coverage, but it’s going to be kind of glimmery. I’m going do some shading, build it up, more and more or you can add your gold to the alcohol.

It gets like a mercury effect. What’s kind of awesome about this is if you wind up using all of your gold, this is $6.00 for this type of gold powder, you can actually add alcohol to it again, after it dries out and use that as a paint at a later time. We want it to be a fairly thick consistency. It’s just going to make it easier to paint.

There I go, it’s kind of awesome, and I go on it kind of thickly to get a nice, almost gold foil-like effect. There you go and I’m just letting it fill itself in. So there are some different ways you can paint using gold luster dust.

Transcript

Alright, so now we want to fondant our cake.

We’ve got a beautiful, chilled cake that’s been perfectly crumb coated. It’s ready to go. I have some fondant paste here. And what fondant paste basically is is a gelatin and powdered sugar mixture, and it should feel like Play-Doh. So, once you get it out of your bucket, you want to knead it. Press down with the heel of your hand forward, then take your fingers and fold it back over. If you feel any crumbly bits, you want to cut them out right away. You don’t want to incorporate them into your fondant, or you’re going to have some little pebbles in there. They don’t get softer.

So it should get to the consistency where, when you rub it like this, you get a beautiful, smooth finish. You shouldn’t see any little folds in there. Now, how much fondant do you need for a cake? That’s a great question. What I have here is one of my many tape measures. And what I’m going to do is lightly drape it over the cake. Alright. So, this goes to the three-seventh mark.

The way to measure your fondant is you want to have a disc that’s about an inch tall that will flip over three times within that amount of area. So I’ve got my measure down here to three-seven. I’m going to mark it with my fondant paddle, you guys can see it there. And I don’t know if I have one, two, three, it’s pretty much perfect. It’s a little bit thick, so I’m going to cut a little off. I don’t want to have so much that I’ve got a giant overhang over my cake. If I do that, it’s going to really tug down. This is not light stuff, and my corners are fairly sharp. So if I have too much fondant and too much overhang, it’s going to really want to rip around the top, which can be very frustrating.

You’ll notice, too, that my cake is on top of a little riser here. And that’s so that, after it’s fondanted, I can go in and cut straight around. I don’t have to go in and cut around the edge there, so I’m going to get a nice, sharp edge to my bottom. Move that off to the side.

I have some powdered sugar here and a fine-mesh strainer. I have two fondant paddles. I like to have two so I can have one hand on top while the other one smooths the side. And I’m going to put a thin, light layer of powdered sugar over the entire area which I’m going to roll it out onto. So I’m not just doing a pile in the center and pushing it out. I’m doing the giant, giant circles. So that’s about how big it’s going to be. Less is more with the powdered sugar. You don’t want to overdo it because the corn starch that is in powdered sugar will dry it out really quickly.

The pin that I’m using is a French rolling pin. What I really love about this is that it’s beveled on the side so that I can give more pressure on the left side or the right side so that I get a really perfect circle. Also, my right arm is much stronger than my left, so this helps me to even that out.

So I’m going to start by just rolling between here and here. You’ll notice I’m not going over the edge. I pick up a little more of the powdered sugar. If you’re doing a lot of these, it’s a good idea not to wear blue jeans. This will pick up any kind of lint. The powdered sugar helps to create a static electricity, so any little fuzzies will attach to this. Okay, here we go.

Now is not the time to answer the phone. If you walk away from this, it’s going to be so dry that when you try to put it on your cake, it’s going to crack around the edges, and you’re going to get what looks like elephant skin. I’m taking this down to about an eighth of an inch. If you can see the pattern of the table beneath it, it’s too thin.

Alright. So, I will bring over my cake which has just come out of the refrigerator. I will put the bore, the rolling pin straight over the top and roll this back up. And as I roll it onto itself, I’m dusting off any excess powdered sugar. That will keep it from sticking to the butter cream. There we go. This is the easiest way to pick it up. Move this directly in front of you. And I’m going to line up the bottom lip with the bottom of the cake and then slowly unroll it over the top. And if it’s a little bit shy of the bottom, that’s okay. As we work this, it’s going to be pressing down, pulling down. So immediately, you’ll notice I’m working really fast. I attach it to the top and that top inch of the cake. And what that’s doing is alleviating a lot of the weight from the bottom so it’s not tugging down.

So, now the tricky part. I’m going to pull it out with my left hand, and with my right hand, I’m going to take these three fingers and this part of the palm of my hand, and I’m going to make circular motions. Just smooth it all down and attach it to the butter cream. Fondant’s kind of a magic product. It absorbs back into itself. So I’m only moving in one direction. I like to go from right to left. If you’re left-handed, you just do it the exact opposite way.

And there we have our last little fold. Okay. So if you have some folds that have gone over each other, it’s not really going to fix itself. You kind of have to pull this off, fix your butter cream, put it in the refrigerator, and then start over. You can use the fondant again if you peel if off. Just take a wet paper towel and wipe off any excess butter cream, and you’ll be able to use it that way.

So you’ll notice I have a few bubbles at the top. If I have a straight pin, I just pierce them. But with this, I’m just going to poke it with a knife, and then I’ll go back and smooth that in later so we won’t be able to see it. There we go.

Alright, so I’m just going to use this on the top so that I’m not leaving a hand print again. And I’m going to go all the way around the cake. And this will smooth out any ridges in the butter cream beneath. All-righty. I have a clean, sharp blade here. I’m going to go straight in, find the bottom of my board, just like this, whoops. And I’m only going to take the knife in. I’m not going to saw it back and forth. If I saw it back and forth, it’s going to pull the fondant out and distort it a little bit. So I just go all the way around. And back into the refrigerator it goes.

And that is how you fondant a cake.

Transcript

So, how do you talk to your cake designer or maker? It’s a little tricky. Cakes are usually booked 6 months in advance.

So, if you’re calling them a year and a half in advance, they’re going to have a hard time wrapping their head around the exact date. If you call them a week before your wedding, they may have a hard time accommodating your request. So, it’s best to give yourself a 3 to 6 month window, to contacting your baker or decorator.

You also want to come to them with some ideas, if you can. Either give them full rein or give them some really clear direction. Meaning, your going to come to them and show them your invitations, maybe what your wedding dress looks like. They can incorporate the lace that you’re going to have on your veil into some elements that’s going to be represented on you wedding cake. It’s a great way to really tie in all the different ideas behind your wedding design.

A good thing to do too, for wedding planning in general, is to come up with a mood board. So, not necessary pictures of the chairs you’ll want for the reception, but the kind of spirit you want to invoke. What do you want to people to feel? How do you want them feel? Is it a really beachy, Summery feel, or do you want kind of a snowy, Aspen type feel? Also, architectural elements. Do you want it to look like a surf hut? Do you want a really casual, fun event like that, or do you want it to be very formal?

Having as much information ahead of time to give to the cake decorator, is really going to be reflected in your cake.

Also, floral designs. If you can speak to your florist before you speak to your cake designer, that’s great. That way they can start all most immediately, putting together sugar flowers, if that’s what they’ll be doing for your wedding, which can give them a really good head start. But really keep an open mind and let them run away with it. You’re basically commissioning an artist and you want something that comes from them.

A lot of brides will bring in picture of other cakes. That’s not verboten. That’s totally fine. We’re happy to see our colleges work. Sometimes we get our own pictures back which is always really fun. Let that serve as an inspiration. No body wants to do an exact version of somebody else cake. Just like you wouldn’t want them coming to your job and saying, ‘Remember that person that was here before you? Do it exactly the same.’ Let them put their own spin on it. I think you’ll be really happy with the end result.

So, those are some great tips on how to interact with your baker or decorator.

Transcript

One of the most important parts of putting together a wedding cake is having a strong foundation, and that means having tier boards beneath each tier of your wedding cake. Having those tier boards is going to enable you to put supports underneath so that each tier can be held up. If you ever held a cake, you know that it’s really heavy once you’ve got all of the butter cream in there. If you were to just set that onto of another tier, eventually, hopefully not halfway through the wedding, but it would start to sink down and the cake would tip over. We want to make sure that we have a really strong foundation, and the best way to do that is with a strong tier board.

What I have here is a sheet of foam core that you can buy at your local arts supplies store and I have the cake pan from one of the tiers that I baked off. I’m just going to set this down in the center, grab a pencil, and I want to trace around the outside. You’ll notice I’m tracing around the outside of the bottom of the pan, not the top. The top is about a 1/4 -inch out, so I don’t want it to be too far outside. We’ll just go around in a nice circle, meet myself halfway around. There we go. Now I’ve got a circle traced out.

As you bake your cake, you’ve probability found that the cake shrinks a little bit on the inside of the pan. By going around the width of the outside of this pan, we’re going to have a little bit of a lip, which is great, so we can coat that with our butter cream. I have an XActo blade here; I’m just going to dip it down into the center. This takes a little bit of practice. You do 2 or 3 and you’ll get used to it. The first time you do it, make sure you buy a little extra foam core. You see, I’m just following my line, and I pick up the board and move it as I go along. I’ve got a self-healing cutting mat underneath, which is imperative if you have a nice table that you don’t want to ruin. We keep going.

If you’re doing a giant cake, you may want to invest in Masonite boards. You can order those through specialty cake shops or have them made by your local lumberyard. There we go. That is how you cut out a tier board.