Merry Christmas!

This week was my third week of class and we began working with fondant.  We covered 2 dummy cakes made of styrofoam and one Milk Sponge Cake filled with two layers each of pistachio buttercream and apricot buttercream.  We also made our own fondant and used it to cover one of our cakes.  We covered the other two cakes with a brand of fondant commonly used in professional bakeries called Satin Ice.  The Satin Ice was definitely easier to work with, but the fondant was fun to make and would make a great alternative if you needed extra fondant in a pinch.  The first dummy cake we made was wrapped with a fondant ribbon border and piped using a pattern called Swiss dots.

A 9-inch round cake covered with my fondant and the Swiss Dot technique.

The next cake we made was a 2-tiered Christmas present cake.  It had a little much going on for my taste, but it incorporated a lot of new techniques that I had never tried.  It was time consuming, but fun to make.  The first thing we did was cover the bottom tier with fondant and then we created a quilted pattern on all over the cake.  The quilted lines were very difficult to measure, but I think they turned out pretty well for my first attempt.

Probably my cake's "good side."

My quilted cake.

After quilting the bottom layer we filled the top of our second tier with something called Cornelli Lace.  To make Cornelli Lace you draw squiggles with your icing making sure that none of your lines ever cross one another.  The lace was time  consuming, but very beautiful.

My first attempt at Cornelli Lace.

The bird's eye view of my top tier.

After creating lace to cover the top of our cakes we painted holly leaves on the sides of the top tier using a technique called needlepoint.  We piped the outline of the holly leaves using royal icing and then used a paint brush to pull in the edges of the leaves and fill the middle making a kind of sewn looking finish.  My holly was not good at all, but at least I tried!  The holly berries were simply red fondant balls.  Our next step was to cover the bottom tier with a ribbon and create a red fondant rope border for the top tier and finally to stack the cake.

My atrocious holly leaves!

Did I mention we also made fondant ribbons and put used those as cake toppers?

My fondant ribbon.

My stacked cake.

And another view

To top the entire cake off, we made 100 yellow fondant buttons and painted them with a gold paste made from vodka and gold luster dust.  We affixed the buttons to the crosses in the quilting using yellow royal icing.  Et voila!  Here's my finished cake.

My buttons

The finished product

Thanks for reading and Bon Appetit!