Pastry Course Day Thirteen: Covering Cake, Piping Flowers and Decorating a Dummy Cake

The highlight of this week’s lesson was decorating a dummy cake. However, we started our lesson by learning how to cover a cake with royal icing and how to pipe several types of flowers.

You can cover a cake with royal icing, ganache or buttercream, in our case we used royal icing. I had never learned how to properly ice a cake so that it still looks good. My way of covering a cake is adding a thin layer of buttercream to the cake so the fondant will stay nicely on the cake. But this was a little bit different. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of my iced dummy cake, but I have to say, it looked pretty good, all nice and smooth. Then again, I can tell you anything, without a photo I can’t proof it anyway 😉

Piping flowers was also nice to see. When it was explained it all looked so easy, but once I started piping the flowers myself it turned out to be a bit more difficult than I thought. I did make some nice flowers though. I eventually started making ‘fantasy’ flowers and not even trying to make them look like a ‘real’ flower. And I have to say, that tactic works for me :-). The flowers looked really cute!

The best part of the day was decorating the dummy cake. All of the piping techniques we learned the last couple of weeks we were able to try out on the cake. I covered my cake with pastry pink fondant first and then started piping royal icing. I have to say, it went pretty well and I’m really happy with the end result!

Next week we’ll be trying out our techniques on a real cake. I’m looking forward to it already!