I'm back!

Boy, it's been a while since I've had a chance to post to any of my blogs. I really want to blog, but the technical stuff gets so confusing to me sometimes that it's just easier not to.

Anyway, enough of the excuses and whining. I am going to try and get this going. I may not get all of my older cakes on here, but if you're interested in seeing some of them, you can check out my facebook page. I'm trying to get the albums up to date on there this week.

In other news, we are making some decisions about how to get a licensed kitchen so I can get this business started. I have some phone calls to make tomorrow and hopefully I'll have some more info to post then.

In decorating news, I've been playing around with some new techniques. I have always struggled with covering cakes with fondant and getting super smooth sides. They look great at first, but within a couple of hours the sides are bulging out and look terrible. My guess is that the cakes are kept very cold at all times to keep this from happening. Then I wonder do they serve the cake cold or at room temperature? I do have a large fridge now, but it's in my detached garage--downstairs from my kitchen. I'm none too thrilled about the idea of hauling a cake up and down that flight of stairs 4 or 5 times in the process of decorating a cake, especially when there's 6 inches of snow on those steps. Then there's the issue of condensation.

Recently I learned about covering your cakes with ganache before covering with fondant. I found this great tutorial on it. There are some super sweet decorators out there who are willing to share their knowledge. Here's an example for you. This is a cake I did for my daughter a couple years ago.

From a distance it looks pretty good, but if you click on the picture and see it larger you will notice the pink fondant is buckling and puckering all over the place. Looks like it's trying to slide right off the cake. Now, here's a cake I did this past weekend. I covered this cake with a thin coat of buttercream and then with ganache before laying the fondant over.

Can you see how much smoother the sides are? The ganache is very firm at room temperature which keeps the sides of the cake from buckling and bulging. I still have to work on my fondant smoothing skills, but the marks you see in this one aren't from the frosting underneath, they're from my ring and my clumsy fingers bumping into it while trying to decorate. I also rolled the fondant too thin on the edges which made them a little ripply.

Now, here's another cake I did recently. The bottom layer was covered in chocolate ganache while the top one was covered in white chocolate ganache before the fondant layer.

The white chocolate ganache didn't firm up as well as the chocolate so that layer buckled a little. I'm going to have to work on that recipe to get it right.

I have to say I really like the results with the chocolate ganache technique, but I don't think I will be using it on all my cakes. It can get very expensive, and, I know this may sound ridiculous, but chocolate doesn't go with all the different cake flavors. :o)

I hope this might be able to help any other new decorators out there. I'm learning there isn't one right way to decorate a cake. There's lots of different ways and you have to find the one that works for you.

Till next time...
God's love and blessings!