Cake Decorating for Dummies

I have two cakes this weekend. Both are fairly simple designs that I've made plenty of times before. But for some reason or another, I made a completely rookie mistake, causing my entire weekend to pretty much crash and burn.

During the cake decorating classes I took, the instructors taught us a few tricks, like how to make your own decorator bags out of parchment paper, how to smooth frosting, and how to properly layer your cake so it doesn't look like a prop from a horror movie. When you make a cake with a somewhat liquid filling, like lemon curd or raspberry puree, you need to have some sort of buffer between each layer of cake (so the liquid doesn't soak into the cake, disappearing on you) and around the edge (so the filling doesn't squeeze out and leak down your cake). This is especially critical when you have white frosting with raspberry filling. That red shows through easily! I spread a very thin coat of frosting on the top on of the bottom layer and on the bottom of the top layer. Then, I use the same frosting color as the outside of the cake and, with a large round decorator tip, make a ring around the edge of the bottom layer. A dam, of sorts.

So late Friday night, I am working on the first cake. For some reason that still escapes me (maybe I was thinking about this), I neglected to put in the dam. As a result, the bottom tier of the cake looked like this:


By now, I was using other forms of the word "dam." I tried to fix it a couple different ways, only succeeding in having more berry-tinted frosting. By then, it was 3 a.m. and I was very tired. I thought maybe things would look better in the morning.

They didn't.

And now my cake was kinda lumpy. Instead, I called my fantabulous neighbor and borrowed one of her lovely daughters (she has four) to watch my sleepy kiddos so I could hit Wally World untethered. I brought home fondant, my arch-nemesis. Desperate times call for desperate measures.


Now the cake has a lovely, smooth, uniformly-colored exterior. So what if the client didn't order fondant! She didn't say she hated it...I will have to sound convincing when I tell her I "upgraded" her cake. Luckily, I can make drop flowers in my sleep so those turned out just fine.


Just like she requested: two-tiered, white frosted cake with small red flowers, chocolate cake with raspberry filling. Simple, elegant, and possibly the narrowestly-adverted catastrophe of my short career. I think I might add some leaves, give it a little more color.

And of course she reads my blog. I have no pride.