Cake Decorating with Marina Sousa

This weekend I was lucky enough to be able to take a class with the incredible Marina Sousa. Marina is from California and is the owner of Just Cake in Capitola. She has been on tons of Food Network challenges, (winning many) and was a finalist on Last Cake Standing. (Personally, I thought she SHOULD HAVE WON! …and I thought that even BEFORE I met her.) James Roselle (also of Food Network fame) was there as well and he was teaching a different class on flower making (which I was not able to take). Wow, are his flowers gorgeous!

To be honest, my hands were so messy for most of the weekend, I didn’t bother taking pictures. But hopefully I will be able to replicate some of the techniques in the future… and WITH a camera. First, James and Marina gave a demonstration with Isomalt. Isomalt is a low calorie sugar-like substance that is used to make beautiful jewel-like crystals for cake decorating. To use it you heat the isomalt with some water over high heat, stirring constantly with a wooden or silicone spoon. As it heats up, you can continue to add more isomalt until you have the amount you will need. Continue heating and it will start to turn clear and bubble. Continue to heat it until it reaches temperature of 340F. (Use Caution- it is very HOT and you don’t want to burn yourself.)  You can then pour it into a pyrex measuring cup so you can work with it. Let the bubbles settle for a second and then you can pour it into molds. (Be sure to use molds that are suitable for isomalt) Should you wish to color the isomalt, you should do so after it comes to temperate, but before you pour it into the molds. Additionally, you should use a water-based color. When you pour it into a silicone bead string mold, if done correctly, the isomalt will drop down into the the mold. That is how you know you did it right- when it drops down. After it cools, you can cover it with disco dust for a Blinged-out effect.

After the isomalt demo, we made petals from a mixture of fondant and gum paste. We used a veiner from James Roselles’s line that he produces with NY Cake. I have to be honest, the Parrot Tulip Veiner was amazing! It wasn’t the list of supplies we needed, but I wish it was, because it was great and now I want one! All you needed to do was cut out a circle with a basic cookie cutter, put it in the veiner, sandwich it together, peel it out and leave it to dry (James gave us plastic egg carton-type things… they looked like something you would use for deviled eggs). We used a large flower cutter, to cut out the basic shape of a larger flower, and then veined the petals. Then I left it overnight to dry in a bowl, so it would have a curved shaped. When it was dry I then interspersed different color petals, to form a larger fuller flower. To finish the flower, I took a cooled isomalt jewel, dunked it in disco dust and stuck it in the center, affixing it with royal icing to act as edible glue.

Flower close-up

For the bottom layer I incorporated an embossed pattern. I covered the cake in fondant. Then, while it was still fresh, I took a textured rolling pin (rolling pin with a pattern on it) and rolled it around the side of the cake. I had to be sure to match up the seams on the pattern when rolling. To offset the pattern, I dry dusted pearl dust on the cake using an old unused blush brush.  (Thanks James for showing me how to do this and making it look good.)

For the middle layer, instead of covering the section with fondant, I cut a large ribbon or rectangle and wrapped the fondant around. I then used a ruler to imprint lines and painted the sections, alternating colors, using pink and grey (moondust) color. I then wrapped darker pink petals (again, from the fabulous veiner) around the base of the layer.

For the top layer, I needed a design that would allow me to carry the top cake separately. I just wanted to include something that carried the pinks and silver-grey colors throughout. I just rolled out some more pink fondant and cut large and small circles out of the fondant. In the small circles, I imprinted the centers with dragees (edible silver balls) and then affixed them to the centers with royal icing. I then took the larger circles and made a boarder around the base of the top layer with them. Inside, I affixed the smaller pink circles with large dragees in them. Then I took additional pink circles, with smaller dragees, and affixed them above the larger circles, in an alternating pattern.

To finish the cake, I took more pink fondant and molded them into smaller pearls. I them wrapped those around the base of the entire structure and affixed them with royal icing. After that all that was left to do was step back and take a picture… of yeah, and eat!

Thanks again to Marina and James for their knowledge and help this weekend. They really are masters of their craft and it is amazing to see their own creations.

Marina and Me

 

 

 

Fondant Cake with Cornelli Lace

Fondant cake w yellow free-form Cornelli Lace royal icing

Today was a day of extras. I had an extra cake and was looking for something easy but interesting to do with it. I also have extra royal icing lying around. (It keeps for ages, so store your extra in an airtight container) I had seen cakes decorated with this free-form pattern before. Apparently, it is called Cornelli Lace, which I didn’t realize, and it is not supposed to touch. (ops, didn’t realize that on a few strings) You may have seen it on wedding cakes, with a white-on-white pattern used to mimic the lace of the wedding gown. I just thought it would be a quick and easy way to be decorative. I simply took my already made yellow royal icing and number 3 tip (You can use a #1 tip for thinner, more delicate lines), put it into a piping bag and just made a free-form  pattern design. I debated leaving the top plain white fondant, but I was having so much fun with the free-form royal icing, I decided to pipe the top as well as the sides. Just a simple, easy way to use your extras for good decorative use!

Royal Icing: How to totally mess up and then fix Royal Icing (or why you need a stand mixer to make Royal Icing)

So, this is a little story of how to totally mess up and frustrate yourself in the medium that is- Royal Icing.

First of all, what is Royal Icing… Royal Icing is a mixture of powdered sugar, meringue powder or egg whites and water (sometimes lemon juice is added as well). It is commonly used for piping flowers, and is the most-used icing in the Wilton Course 2 classes. If you have ever eaten those hard, sugary flowers (violets, rosebuds, etc…) on top of cupcakes, they were probably made from royal icing. There are other uses for royal icing that I can get into another time, including using it just to cover cookies, but this is really about royal icing for piped flowers.

So with essentially just THREE ingredients in the recipe, one of which was water, I figured how hard could this be to make?! Well, a lot harder than it should be, and a lot more frustrating than I realized. But this is also a little tale of redemption and how I recognized and fixed the disaster that was my first royal icing nightmare.

Royal icing is much more fickle than you would expect. The instructions I received were as follows:

1 lb sifted powdered (confectioners) sugar

3 level tablespoons Meringue Powder (I use Wilton’s Meringue powder available at Michaels or any baking store)

4-6 tablespoons of lukewarm water

mix at low speed

Sounds easy enough, so how did it all end in tears? (ok, not really, but almost)

First you need to sift your powdered sugar- twice! Ok, a bit of a pain, but not too hard to manage. I had done that- check. Add Meringue powder, again simple enough. Now this was the part I was warned about… the water. You don’t want to add too much water, otherwise you will have watery royal icing and you will not be able to pipe with it. I still ended up using 6 tablespoons. And after I had all three ingredients in the bowl, it was time to mix. I took my trusty hand mixer and mixed away. It didn’t last that long, the royal icing gets hard, and it gets stuck in the beaters. I thought I had mixed it enough according to my directions. So before my hand mixer broke, I stopped, colored it and put it in airtight containers. And THAT was my critical error.

This is what the royal icing looked liked.

This is what royal icing SHOULD NOT look like

When I went to class, my teacher told me my icing was too dry. She added some water and stirred it in. When I went to pipe it, it was fairly stiff, but then the shape did not hold, so I ended up getting flowers that looked as if they had melted in the heat.

This is what flowers look like when your royal icing is not the right consistency

Of course at this point I did not understand what I had done wrong. I thought the teacher had just added too much water. So I made the recipe again, this time making it worse (yes, this is possible). Instead of using my hand mixer, I tried to mix the entire batch of icing by HAND.

Somehow something I thought was bad, got even worse! Have you ever tried to pipe cement? Because frankly, this felt like PIPING CEMENT! I burst 3 bags and had massive cramps in my hand. I swore and thought I would never pipe a flower again. It was the most frustrating day of my short-lived baking days. I felt defeated and incompetent and frankly I couldn’t understand why anyone would use this stuff- – -ah, the misery.

But then I got a bit of sleep and did something clever…. I googled it. Thankfully some others had written blogs and responded to online questions before me and it turns out you really do need an electric mixer to make royal icing. But I would say not only do you need an electric mixer, I would GET A STAND MIXER! I REPEAT- GET A STAND MIXER!!!

So, I dumped my cement mixture (aka disaster of royal icing) into my trusty Kitchen Aid stand mixer. Using the PADDLE ATTACHMENTS I just let the glorious mixer do its job. My advice to anyone in this process is to SET THE MIXER ON AND WALK AWAY (really)… go to the bathroom… do SOMETHING that takes about 5 minutes or so. (But if you do go to the bathroom, please don’t forget to wash your hands!) EVENTUALLY the icing will mix well enough to look smooth, almost fluffy and it will form stiff peaks.

Redemption! Turn off the mixer and check the icing. If the peaks droop, mix a bit more, if they stand up without drooping (stiff peaks) you are golden.

almost ready, but not quite

Finished mixing and ready to go!

(Tip: If you have in fact added too much water, just toss in a bit more powered sugar and that will help to fix the icing)

Fill your bag with this soft, luscious, easy-to-pipe icing and make your favorite flowers. They will be much easier to pipe and will stiffen up and look beautiful.

Assorted flowers piped with royal icing

Tip: While piping, I would have a zip-lock bag nearby. When you are not using one of your bags, put it in the bag and seal it to prevent the icing from drying out, becoming hard and unusable. If your tips have hardened icing in them, just put them in a cup of hot water and the icing will dissolve and the tips will be clean in no time and with little effort.