Cake Gadget of the Week

Yes that is what it looks like and no I'm not mental, my cake gadget of the week really is an empty egg box.  OK so I'm not sure an empty egg box really counts as a gadget but they're really handy when it comes to making sugar flowers.

How to..........Quilt A Sugarpaste Covered Cake Board

I was asked a couple of weeks ago to make a cake with a quilted effect cake board and so thought I'd share my easy, low cost method of doing it. 

You can buy all sorts of fancy quilting tools such as this and diamond cutters like these and special tools like this which are all fab but if you don't have any of these to hand its still possible to create a quilted effect with kitchen utensils you probably already have in your drawer.  This method is also a lot more versatile and customisable as you can adjust the size of the diamonds exactly to your liking which may be important depending on your design. 

How to..........Make Sugar Roses

Sugar roses..........the flower every aspiring cake decorator wants to learn.  Yep they can be tricky but master the technique and you can create some really lovely decorations that will always impress.  I did consider posting my own step by step 'how to' but to be honest there's already plenty of tutorials out there online so I won't regurgitate the great stuff that's already out there, but I will let you in on a few of my hints and tips!!

How To...........make (almost!) perfect fondant stripes

Striped cakes seem to be the cake of the moment so thought I'd let you know how I go about getting (almost) perfect stripes on my fondant iced cakes. 

First off, creating the stripes.  You can do this by hand by rolling out some fondant, measuring and then cutting out stripes, however to get a really neat look its worth buying one of these handy little ribbon cutters such as this one by Wilton.  They look overly complicated but once you've got the hang of which spacers go where to get which size of ribbon they're super easy to use.  Just roll over the fondant and voila perfectly sized ribbons.

Now to add them to the cake.  Now you can be all mega technical about this if you like and measure round the cake working out where to place all the ribbons and how many you can fit on.  However if you're like me and prefer a speedier solution I find trial and error and trusting your eye works just as well.  Its easier to place four ribbons on the cake first (two opposite each other) to split the cake into quarters.  Place the four ribbons on the cake (with no water at this point) and have a good luck to see if they look even, if they don't move them around.  Once they look OK dab a bit of water on the back of each ribbon and gently place on the cake and press down.

Once you've got your four quarters sorted you can then fill in the gaps of each quarter.  This ensures you get the same amount of spacing between each ribbon and the same number of ribbons in each quarter.  Again just lay the ribbons on gently to start with to position them and once they look OK then stick onto the cake.

Here's one I made earlier.