Cakes and Making them Pretty

Friends, Romans, Countrymen...

This week, I had to decorate a cake for the final week of my Wilton Basics course. And to decorate a cake, one must first MAKE one.

So I decided to get a little wacky and make an Almond Joy cake. I will admit that it was more of a mix-and-match of grocery-store prepared ingredients with my own special touches than an original recipe, but the object of this game was to make the cake look good. (According to taste testers, it tasted good too. Yay!)



So I made a basic white cake with a couple of teaspoons of almond extract and baked it in two nine-inch cake pans.

 

       
Let the cakes cool in the pan for about ten to 15 minutes. Invert the pan onto the cooling racks and allow to cool thoroughly. If you try to torte (split) or level a warm cake, it will disintegrate. I ran out and got a hair cut just to be safe.

Next, I leveled and filled the cake with coconut curd and almonds. Leveling a cake is quite simple. Holding a knife horizontally, run it through the very top of the cake to take off any extra cake that may have bubbled up when baking.

I was taught to fill a cake like so:

1: Spread a blob of icing onto your cake plate to keep the cake in place when you're working on it. Place the first layer of the cake, level side down.

2: Using a pastry bag with a large, round open tip (I used Wilton #12), create a "dam" around the outer edge of the cake. This dam will keep your filling from shooting out of the cake when you put the next layer on.

3: Scoop your filling into the center of your dam.

4: Spread your filling with a metal spatula. I prefer an angled one. I chose to sprinkle some slivered almonds on top of the coconut curd, in keeping with my Almond Joy theme.

5: Pile your next layer on top, level side up.

 

Next, it's time to frost the actual cake! I used chocolate almond buttercream mixed with some meringue to make it fluffy.

I chose to do a crumb coat, a thin layer of frosting to catch any crumbs so they aren't visible in your final layer of frosting. First, pile some frosting on the top of the cake and spread a thin layer with your metal spatula. Spread it down around the sides of the cake. Let the crumb coat set until you can touch it without the frosting smudging.

For the final layer of frosting, repeat the same process for the crumb coat, but with a larger amount of frosting.



 I decorated my cake with three colors of frosting as well as some edible sugar pearls. I colored my frostings with Wilton's garden set colors, and I ended up with a soft sage green, a butter yellow, and a light mauve.

I used the mauve to pipe drop flowers around the top of the cake and a ruffle border at the base of the cake. I sprinkled both with light yellow edible sugar pearls. I piped leaves with the sage green. With a tiny round tip (Wilton #3) to pipe some squiggles all over the cake to fill the bare space.

Here it is.

Be nice--it's my first one!

Live Long and Prosper,

BB