Lesson 4: Icing the Cake

I have this love-hate relationship with the drop flower tip. I never seem to get consistent results using this tip. A lot of the time the petals separate from each other when I lift the tip. I don’t know if this happens to you. If it does, I’d like to hear about it so I can have someone to complain with. Crystal tells me to let the tip dip in a bit (what a tongue twister) before pulling it up and I do try that, it works for maybe 3 and I am over the moon and then it screws up again. This is when working with American Buttercream is better because with a simple toothpick you can sort of rectify the bodged job. However with the meringue buttercreams…

We start off the morning with practicing some of the previous patterns that we’ve learned like the shell, reverse shell, floret, ribbon, rosebud… gosh listen to me! Rattling off all these styles.

Then we get started on practicing icing a cake. We get a round wood block which in another life may have been a chopping block. We are taught the way to hold the spatula, how to drop the icing on top of the cake and the gentle back and forth motions required ensuring even distribution of the icing over the cake all the while spinning the turntable in short and smooth jerks. Ok, maybe “jerks” is not the right word to use to describe the motion but I can’t for the life of me think of the right word just now. You know what I mean.

The hard part was icing the sides of the cake. Holding the spatula at 90 degrees to the cake turntable at the 6.30 o’clock position and giving the spatula a 30 degree angle to the cake you have to then use those gentle back and fort motions to ease the buttercream evenly onto the sides of the cake. And at the same time you have to be tuning the cake around. PHEW! If that’s not daunting enough, you have to finish each dollop of buttercream with a sweeping motion away from you don’t get any crumbs on the spatula. If you do, you run the risk of ‘contaminating’ the rest of your BC. I hate seeing crumbs on the icing. Absolutely hate it… but it’s sometimes unavoidable. You clean one up and you see another. So the trick is to be really generous with the BC when you put it on the cake and just slowly sweep off the excess as you go along.

I was quite happy with my final result which we topped with drop flowers. Whether I can do that again is another question. Practice, practice, practice!