Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Cover a Round Cake in Fondant

So the first thing I'd like to do is I'd like to go over our list of supplies that were going to be using for doing rolled fund and of course our number one thing is we need rolled funded I make my own rolled fondant, but you can also buy it pre made and there are several brands out on the market so you can kind of decide which one you prefer and you like the taste of if you don't want to make it um but we do have a formula on the website I believe or through creative life I don't know I don't handle the technical and I just do that the sugar and the other thing will meet us we'll need some butter cream I seen um spatulas will need a fondant smoother and these are my fondest smothers now here's one of my very first tricks for ewing nice rolled fondant is I put a little nylon stocking on top of my funding smoother now it must be a new nylon stocking that used just for this don't pull one out of your dresser drawer ok health department really doesn't like that, um one of the tricks and y...

our kitchen is instead of using the brown ones, if you can find some weirdo color, then the health department knows that you're not going to wear that they're just in your kitchen the other thing that you'll need it she'll need a good rolling pin I also like a marble rolling pan they're hard to travel with their heavy and I have a tendency to break him, so I have just the nice wooden one I'm going to be using little pizza cutter, we use the pizza cutter as opposed to a knife because it cuts are funded and not drags it and we don't want to drag and pull out her at our fondant and we're going to need a tape measure and I have a nice tape measure there, um, what else do or we're going to need cake? Oh, and this is another trick. These are upholstery sheet plastic and you need one to fit the size of your cake and I'll get into a little more detail on that as we go along, but that's basically the tools that we're going to need ok, so the first step is let's get our cake ready and I'm going I should also say that when you cover your cake you want to have it on a nice heavy drum, which I thought I headed out here, but I am going to use this one, so I have, um, about two layers of cardboard covered with a foil and I want to put it onto that drum let me move this over here and the first thing I want to do is I want to trim this so that it's nice and flat I have to two ways that we're gonna do this let me show you this very first if you don't have the nice fancy um cutter which I'm guessing most people don't have one of these in there kitchen if you don't have one then you want to use a nice serrated knife and you want to hold it level I like to put mine on the turntable we're going to cut in just about one inch making it nice and level and I'm just going to keep turning it until I get it to where I want it take that off does that look easy yeah ok and then you want to um set that right there you want you want to ice you don't want to isis crummy surface because then you just have issues okay so I'm going to put the crummy surface down what about some blue from my last board that had blue color on it in that nice and this's where your butter cream comes in now in order to fill my decorating big I want to fold the cuff down then I don't have it squishing out the back when I go to squeeze it and have it coming out onto my foot my hands are going to put in and at this point I have a couple on my decorating bag and I'm just going to use the coupler now, do you ladies have you prepared a decorating bag before? Are you going to need some help with that? I want to make sure my cake is level is possible, and I'm just going to build a reservoir. I used to call it building a dam and called it my damn just build some damn work there, and I did my first international convention demonstration, and one of my comments that I got back was she was a very good decorator, except she swore locked so I was like, what? I have some peach filling and my peach filling or any filling can be something as simple as a jar of, um, jelly or jam that you mixed with a little of your butter cream. It can be a little container of fruit that you mix in any time you use a fruit or something really soupy, you have to be kind of careful cause that can help your cake get really soggy and be slipping when you're, um, when you're working and you don't want it to slip, you wanted to be sturdy. You'll also notice that I haven't filled this all the way to the top of my reservoir I just have a a thin layer and they're just beneath all it's actually doing is adding some moisture to my cake and some flavor. Ok. And that's ready for the next layer soul set that they're now then I want to show you how to use this type of cutter if you're awesome enough to have one or you decide that you want to have one. So what I want to do is I want to set this on my surface and I want to cut off that top, so I'm going to raise this about three or four nachos, make sure you have it on the same sitting on both ends because then otherwise you're creating topsy turvy when you didn't want one. I don't want to make sure it's right level well that we move this down here so I can see what I'm doing and you can see what I'm doing. Okay? So once I have it to the level that I want it, can you see how I've got that? You see that? Then I'm just going to saw back and forth careful not to cut yourself there fairly sure it's easy to do and then I have this nice level cake. Isn't that awesome looking? You guys just go? Yeah, lawson okay, now, at this point in order to get the crummy side on the base, so I'm not icing the crime it's, because crumbs and lumps are bad. Okay, crumbs and lumps or bad just remember that I'm going to use a piece of cardboard to set it right on top. Flip it over and I'm going to remove my wax paper and then I'm gonna line it up and scooch it right on top. Now, this is just a little eight inch round cake. It didn't really have to be done that way. I could have very easily have there's my brush. I could have very easily just probably picked it up and put it on, but I wanted to show you how to do that so that you knew when you're doing that twelve or fourteen inch cake. Okay, because you use this method for everything, and if you're doing an eighteen inch cake, you just use a nice, dirty piece of cardboard to do it. Ok, so now I have my cake trimmed and layered and filled. Now, let's, put on a thin layer of buttercream. Listen, I'm gonna come in with a quick, quick question. We're already getting questions from the chat room, okay? So when you're when you're doing a cake like this, how long do you? How long will it take sort of from start to finish, especially for a beginner, like the beginners air out there asking like how long will it take me to make put this all together well if you have all your ingredients put together and you've got your icing made and everything you can do it as quickly as thirty minutes but if you're a beginner plan about two hours okay and then the more you the more you learn the more that that time kind of get it is cutting down the other thing is too is sit with the funded covered cakes if your cake is a little on the cool side if you can refrigerate it for a few minutes say maybe I say a few minutes if you can refrigerate it for say an hour you're going to get a better result than if you do it straight out of the cooled panned um because it just has a chance to firm up and be solid and that actually you have another question for a temperature so how how she keep your temper your kitchen temperature wise and what's the best temperature for the funding I like I like to work in sixty eight to seventy degree temperature okay um some people like a little warmer you're funding is easier to work with if it's warm okay um but then it also has repercussions if it's too warm so you have to kind of find a nice balance for yourself if you have warm hands you're going to be further ahead than if you have cold hands, ok um yeah temperatures make a difference and one last question you make your own funding correct? Yes I do and we're also going to provide the people who purchase the class with that recipe am I correct? I believe so great perfect. Thank you alright fact thank you it'll build your couple upper body and fund it is actually fairly easy to make has a few unusual ingredients but it's not very tough to do it does take a little time and it's actually quite affordable. So ok, so now what I've done is I put on a couple of globs of butter cream and all I'm going to do at this point is we're going to do a crumb coating or thin coat of buttercream I basically want enough to firm up to cover the cake and to give something for my funding to stick to it doesn't go on a naked cake it has to go on to something now if we were doing this the australian or british method we would be doing a fruitcake and we would be covering it first with rolled marsa pan. And before you put on the mars a pan, you would brush your cake your fruitcake down with a boiled hot um like an apricot glaze or apricot jam and the reason you do this is because it kills the bacteria on the surface so that you don't have any fermentation happening with your cake now because we're doing this american style, we do everything quick, fast and we're going to eat it the next day where is the british and australians spend a little more time they spend more time decorating that cake will sit there covered for us long is maybe two or three months before they cut into it. So what you would do if you were doing a british method or in australia? Method is you would brush your cake down with the boiled apricot glace, then put your rolled almond paste on it that makes their surface light colored so that it doesn't the fund it doesn't the fruitcake doesn't bleed through your fondant, then you would put another layer of the boiled apricot glaze and then you would put your funding on top of that, so you're funding is sticking to that apricot glaze in our case it's going to stick to our buttercream icing it as much as we love butter cream it's got to be a fairly thin layer because if it's too thick than our fund it's going to be all lumpy and move around and that's not good either. When we first started doing the fund that we used to trim all of our edges and have everything be rounded, we don't bother with that so much anymore we just put it on a square cake okay, so now I have my board kind of cleaned up because I'm angle about stuff like that and let's go ahead and sit then he moves he's different here miss at the cake, right? They're going to move my turn table over here, okay? And at this point I'm going to roll out my sheets of upholstery plastic they also sell and you can buy the issue could buy everything and listen to you say upholstery plastic its upholstery plastic and they come engages so like this one is about a medium thickness you don't want one too thin and, you know, really needed that thick it's fairly affordable and it's always going to see it used to be super easy to find it's getting a little more difficult but places like um jo ann fabrics and michael's if they sell fabric I know joan's um hobby lobby yeah hobby lobby they all sell that and so here's your limit I need to have I need to have a piece of plastic that is big enough for my cake. So what I need to do is this is where your tape measure comes in is you measure your cake and I always say measure because even though you go well it's an eight inch cake and each layer is supposed to be two inches tall and blah blah, blah measure it because sometimes when you think you need or you add wrong okay, so my cake is three inches tall, we're going to go across it makes it eleven, so I need fifteen inches of fond it to cover this cake, but that means I need to roll out about seventeen inches in order to make sure it works. So at this point, I can do seventeen inches on this piece of plastic because this place a plastic is twenty nine inches wide, so at this point, this plastic that I'm using, I'm limited to twenty nine inches, which is probably about an eighteen inch cake um, but I'm limited to the size of the cake that I can cover with this as to how big the plastic is. Now this upholstery plastic comes fifty five inches wide, so if you stop and consider that if I had a cake to do, that was that I needed to have fifty five inches of fondant that's my limit and fortunately, I don't have to do too many of those too often, and most people don't, but I have seen it done and I have watched food network a lot and thought to myself, why aren't they using plastic? They're doing this the hard way um, more more companies are realizing this is the way to go, and they're starting to sell those