Tutorial – Cake Lace and Ruffles

Finally I got around to try out my cake laces which I had purchased at the Cake World Germany in Hamburg. Claire Bowman had a fantastic selection, so I had a hard time choosing. Eventually, I bought a small and a big mat. The good thing about laces is that once tightly wrapped, you can store them for quite some time and they will still be flexible. For our cake, we used laces that we had prepared some weeks before.

 

But lets not get ahead of ourselves =) For the two-tier cake we had to make two cakes, obviously. The bottom one had a diameter of approx. 24cm/ 9inch, a sponge cake and an apricot cream cheese filling. For the icing we used butter cream so we cut stick the ruffles on easily.

The top cake, about 20cm/ 8inch in diameter, had a chocolate sponge cake filled with a white chocolate cream. We iced with milk chocolate ganache and covered with turquois (SugarFlair turqouis) fondant.

We used a cake board as a base for both cakes and covered that in white fondant.

 

For the ruffles, I used the third rose petal cutter by fmm. I rolled out a thin piece of white fondant and cut out the petals. We used Xenos fondant (so no special brand =)) which dries quicker than  Massa ti chino for example, so that only helped here.

Now I used the foam pad to thin out the petals. First with the end of the rolling pin, then a second time with the ball tool to get some extra flat edges. But normally one round around the edge is fine to get the wavy effect.

 

To let the petals dry, place them in a hollow. This foam pad is just perfect for this matter. Lightly press them in with your ball tool.

This is how you get those strong waves that you want to have. They normally all look different by nature, but if you don't like it, then just go ahead and reshape it.

 

Let them dry for a while and start preparing the next batch. You'll need A LOT! We didn't count them, but its easily been more than 200.

 

Place the petals on your cake, beginning at the bottom and working your way up to the top. Lightly press them into the butter cream and make sure not to leave any big holes. Its best to not have them dried out completely so you can still adjust them. Once you've set the next cake onto this one, you can place the petals on the top surface too.

Unfortunately, we didn't take any pictures from the stacking process. We used three bamboo sticks to support the top cake.

Happy birthday Katharina =)

by Christina