Cake Decoration - Part II

Presenting the fruit of my labour...

This was the cake that I baked & decorated for my elder boy's 5th birthday..

Chocolate Sponge with Buttercream Icing

Cake Decoration - Buttercream Icing

I had this ambition to bake a cake for my son's birthday this year... but then cake decoration is not an easy task... from mixing butter cream to the right consistency to spreading it on the cake and making it look as smooth as possible... gosh.. these are tough work!

The last time I decorated a cake when almost a year ago, did a durian mousse cake for MIL's birthday but failed terribly for the decoration.. had limited ingredients then and didn't really know how to decorate.. :p to me, it was way too ugly though everyone sang praises.. they are all too kind to say negative things.. hee...

Anyway, I used the Wilton Buttercream Icing recipe to cover the cake in 2 coats - 1 crumb coat & another layer over the crumb coat... I let the crumb coat crust in the fridge for about 20mins before applying the 2nd layer... tried to use parchment paper to smooth the top but wasn't successful cos mine wasn't non-stick! this is why you could see the 'waves' on the surface of the cake :p Anyway, I came up with the idea of using chocolate rice to cover the 'uneven' icing on the sides and it turned out well.. (so this is what you do when you can't smooth the buttercream properly.. :D)

I also made Chocolate Buttercream for piping around the cake... my son had loads of fun piping and eating the cream!

So here it is.. my 1st attempt at whole cake decoration.. :D

Chocolate Buttercream

Ingredients:
· 125 gm. Butter
· 125 gm. margarine
· 80 gm. icing sugar
· 100 gm. melted cooking chocolate

Method:
· Put butter, margarine and icing sugar in the mixing bowl and beat until light.
· Pour in melted chocolate and mix evenly (I added cocoa powder instead of melted chocolate and it turned out very nice too)

Chocolate Sponge

Over the weekend, I tried out this basic sponge cake recipe from Alex Goh’s Fruity Cakes recipe book. Added cocoa powder to the recipe since the kids love chocolate!

Ingredients A
· 4 eggs
· 120g sugar

Ingredients B
· 95g flour, sieved
· 15g cocoa powder

Ingredient C
· 70g melted butter


Method:
1) Put ingredients A into mixing bowl and beat until white & fluffy
2) Slowly fold into Ingredients A mixture from Step 1 – mix well
3) Stir in ingredient C to the mixture and mix well
4) Pour the batter into a greased baking tin and bake in preheated oven at 180 °C for 25mins


Notes:
· I reduced the amount of sugar to 100g as I didn't want it to be too sweet.

· I didn’t have any butter in the fridge and so I used the Olive-Canola magarine I had to replace butter. Taste good as well!
· For a vanilla sponge, simply replace the cocoa powder with same amount of flour (total 110g) and add ¼ tsp of vanilla essence (to Ingredients A).