How to Stack Cakes

This week I took the Wilton "Tall Cakes" project class at Michael's. It was a lot of fun, but there sure was a lot of prep work! For one thing, the class was encouraged to bring pre-made decorations from home, so I went a bit overboard (and of course I only used a fraction of all these royal icing pieces! Incidentally, that's the royal icing heart chain in the upper left corner; it's grown since I wrote about it, and it's held together perfectly!):

The other major bit of prep work, of course, was to bake a couple of cakes. This is a 6" cake on a 6" uncovered cake circle, and a 10" cake on a 14" foil-covered circle (not aluminum; it needs to be foil for cake decorating). It took 3 boxes of cake mix (chocolate fudge, BTW) to make these two 4-layer cakes, plus I had enough left over to fill another 6" pan (incidentally, owning three 6" pans is a good idea if you like the concept of having a very tall, cylindrical cake; one box of cake mix will fill three 6" pans perfectly). 

I'm ashamed to admit, I drive more carefully with a carload of cakes than a carload of family members. You can't exactly strap a cake in with a seatbelt! But you can keep them more or less in place with a generous amount of no-skid shelf liner, that rubbery material you can buy by the roll. This cake caddy (shown without the locking dome) fits the non-slip circle that came with my turntable, so I line it with that. I've never had a cake budge in this caddy. For good measure, I also usually tuck a jacket or blanket or something around the caddy in the car. 

The other cake wasn't unrealistically huge, but the 14" cake circle it was on made finding the right box challenging. It wound up traveling in our DVR box, again on a sheet of shelf liner (and with an additional sheet under the box in the car). 

I felt weird about taking photos in the classroom; like I was some spy sent in by Ateco to see what's going on. Plus, I figured there's probably a million tutorials online, each as good as the last, so I didn't take my customarily high number of photos. I snuck in a few, though. The first step in figuring out the support system (which EVERY tiered cake needs) is to determine the placement of the dowels. For relatively small cakes, bamboo dowels (or even drinking straws) will work. For upwards of three tiers, it's a good idea to upgrade to plastic dowels for the lower tiers. The teacher did a great job of walking me through this. We started by putting my 6" cake on a piece of parchment paper and tracing it. We cut out that circle and laid it on top of the 10" cake, as centered as possible. Then we took the tips of the scissors, and gently dented the icing through the parchment to make the four marks into which the bamboo dowels will be inserted (an inch or so inside of the outer edge of the parchment circle). 

We inserted a bamboo dowel into one of the marks and pushed it in until it touched the cake circle below. We made a mark on the dowel at the level of the cake, removed the dowel, and cut it with a pair of pruning shears. There were pieces of dowel flying EVERYWHERE; I wouldn't attempt this again without protective eye covering. We cut three more pieces of dowel the same length as the first one and inserted them into all the points we'd marked:

The one thing I wish I would have done before putting the 6" cake on its cardboard circle was to drive a dowel-sized hole through the center of the circle. I managed to do it with an awl and the tip of the scissors with the cake on it, though; no problem. A center dowel is measured that goes through the bottom tier (or tiers) and a little more than halfway into the top tier; a measuring tape came in handy. Before driving the center dowel into the bottom cake, I put a small smear of buttercream in the center of the cake to help stabilize the incoming tier. I was ready to use a bit of powdered sugar to separate the tiers, but the teacher recommended against it, since I had a windy road in my near future. Powdered sugar (or even shredded coconut) will help to keep the tiers from sticking to each other, but it doesn't have much of a glue-like property. 

Then I set the top tier down, after I wiggled it around to line up the hole in the cardboard circle with the center dowel. 

 At this point there's not much more to do than decorate the heck out of it! Especially around the base of the top tier; no evidence of the internal structure should be visible. I really gave Ateco Tip #96 a workout!

To make the top mound of roses, I put a few tablespoons of buttercream in the center and just stuck the roses into it. The recipe for the buttercream came from the book "Baking With the Cake Boss"; it's really yummy! This was all the decorating I felt like doing in class; I didn't want to stick a whole bunch of pieces on it that might fall over or off…

…I waited until I was home to do that:

In case you're curious, a cake of this size is supposed to serve 40 people. Thankfully, I knew a group of about that size meeting the next night: The Coastside Chorale. I really didn't want to have that much cake in the house! I'm glad they were able to give it a good home. 

Piping a Rose on a Cupcake

 

I got a really swell book for Christmas: Baking With the Cake Boss, by Buddy Valastro. 90%+ of the time I'll blindly accept anything Buddy says as the last word in cake decorating, but there's one concept in this book I just can't get behind, regarding roses on cupcakes: "…you will want to use a rose nail for making roses for both cakes and cupcakes. Piping directly onto cupcakes is best left to the professionals." Really? C'mon now; this is cake decorating, not freakin' rocket surgery! All it takes is a statement like that for me to find a way to defy it, so I think I've got it down and I'd be remiss in not showing it to you posthaste. Here's what you need:

That's it: a cupcake, a pastry bag loaded with medium-consistency icing (softer than toothpaste, but stiff enough to hold its shape) and a round Wilton #12 tip on a coupler, and a Wilton #104 rose tip on standby. If you're piping a whole batch of these, do this first step on all the cakes: with the #12 tip, hold the bag perpendicular to and just above the center of the cupcake. Squeeze firmly; allow the icing to spread out to about the size of a quarter, then start moving the bag away from the cupcake while decreasing pressure. When the shape is more or less that of a Hershey's Kiss, stop pressure and pull the bag away. If the shape is even close, it will probably work. If it's nowhere near close, pluck it off and eat your mistake. Alternately, practice on a piece of parchment or waxed paper until you have it down, and then scrape all your mutant Kisses off with an offset spatula back into the original icing container or the pastry bag. 

The next step will be piping petals, so switch to a Wilton tip #104. I think what Buddy was saying about how to not attempt to pipe roses directly on a cupcake without a nail had something to do with the ease of rotating you get with a nail; it basically is a tiny turntable. To a slightly lesser extent, you can get the same effect with your hand. This is the first position; holding the cake, turn your hand in as tightly as possible:

And this would be the final position, with your hand rotated as far away from you as possible:

So, it's time to start piping petals. Bear in mind, for the next several steps the cake is held in the non-dominant hand, which I couldn't do while holding the bag and the camera, so the cake is on the counter and not in-hand. Switch the tip on the bag to #104, and get familiar with holding it at this angle to the "Kiss." The wide side of the teardrop-shaped tip will be down (which should be logical; you want the edges of the petals to be thinner than the base, right?).The tip should also be angled away from you slightly, and not perpendicular to the "Kiss" (if it was, when you start piping you'd knock it over; the goal is to wrap the first spiral of icing around the "Kiss"). Start with the narrow end of the tip just above the "Kiss"…

…and pipe a continuous spiral around the top of the "Kiss," using the starting-and-ending hand positions pictured above:

Ideally that little hole in the center of the spiral would be looking upwards, but this is close enough and not bad for a first attempt. Guess what: the hardest part is over, and now all you need to do is pipe petals to cover the rest of the "Kiss". The first row consists of 3 overlapping petals (again, use the starting-and-ending hand positions to rotate the cake around while you pipe). The wide base of the tip is touching the "Kiss" and the narrow end is angled slightly outward. There's a very slight upside-down "U" hand motion involved with the piping of each petal, but as you squeeze the shape will form pretty naturally; you won't need to force it into existence with a lot of hand movement:

Here's the next layer of 5 overlapping petals; note the tip is angled slightly more outwards (otherwise your rose would have rather unnatural, parallel rows of petals). It also looks more natural if you manage to not line up each row of petals with the one before it; try to offset each row a little, like tabs in an accordion folder:

 Next, pipe a row of 7 petals, or however many you need to finish covering the "Kiss." After the row of 7, I stopped counting. I think there was one more row that also had 7 at the very base. By the time you get to that final row of petals, the tip will practically be lying flat on the cupcake; do whatever you can to get the petals in there:

To finish this rose off, it's nice to pipe some leaves. I had an Ateco Tip #69 on a bag of green icing lying around, so I piped a few. Push the end of the tip under the rose and start squeezing while you pull out a leaf. when it's the length you want, stop the pressure and pull the bag away. If the leaves' edges look ragged, you can pinch them into a nice leaf shape with your fingers; touch your fingertips to a dusting pouch filled with a 50/50 mix of cornstarch and powdered sugar so they won't stick to the icing (I had to do this with every single leaf in this photo because the icing was very thick and the edges tore and were not pretty):

Well, that's it. In closing, I'd have to say I prefer to pipe roses on a rose nail and then transfer them to the cupcake with a flower lifter, but if all I had handy were my hands, they're a couple of pretty well-made machines that get the job done.