By Michelle Anderson
Cake Decorating Expert
Creating a perfect cake can be an incredible experience but often
that cake can experience mishaps before it is presented at the event. It
is important to take as many precautions as possible to ensure your
cake looks the way you envisioned.
The first step to success is
making sure your cake is the best it can be. Cake decorating can be
compared to landscaping in some ways. In both fields you can hide errors
or less than perfect foundations with a little extra covering whether
it was fondant or sod! This statement is true to an extent as many cake
decorators can tell stories about adding extra flowers to a corner where
the fondant cracked or piping an extra wide border where gaps are too
large to be visually appealing. Cake designers sometimes forget the
actual cake as they get excited about showcasing their spectacular
decorating skills. People will obviously remember the exterior of the
cake but they will talk about the way it tastes as well.
So it is important that all the elements mesh well
together to create a perfect experience from eyes to taste buds. Try to
hone your baking skills along with your design skills in order to
achieve the balance. If a cake does not come out of the oven the way it
is supposed to try and figure out what happened and do it again.
The
next step is to create a solid foundation for all your hard work. Cakes
do not simply sit quietly and firmly on top of one another in stacks.
They need rigid architecture based stabilizers and many dowel, cake
board or pillar combinations to keep them level and steady. It is one
thing to create a breathtaking cake design but clearly another set of
skills that keeps that masterpiece from falling or leaning into the
guests. Wedding cakes are not the only cakes that need to be stable,
even a child's birthday cake should be up to the task of staying upright! Make sure you always follow correct stacking process to ensure your cake makes it to the cutting portion of the event.
If
you are transporting your cake you will have to be proactive about
repairing damage that might occur along the way and limit the
possibility of incidents. The first tip is to transport tiered cakes as
single cakes in their own safe boxes rather than in an unstable stack.
The most important strategy for damage control is having a cake
decorating repair kit on hand when transporting a cake. Here are some
valuable things to have in your kit so that your fabulous creations make
it to the event and through the set up.
- A container of icing used for the cake
- Piping bags filled with the icing used for the design
- Tips used for the icing details on the cake
- Extra design elements used on the cake such as gum paste flowers, dipped berries, cut outs and fondant ribbons
- Dowels, separators and cake boards
- A level, scissors, palette knife, wire cutters
- Fondant
- Any tools that are used when making the cake
source: about.com
