Happy Sunday! Hope you had a really wonderful St. Patrick's Day! Unfortunately most of our household got sick this weekend so we've been lying low and have postponed our dinner until Thursday. Fortunately the cake that was due this week was already done and photographed!


This 3 tiered Easter Cake is a demonstration on how you can use packaged decorations and cookie cutters to decorate a cake. Even if you haven't learned how to make and use fondant yet, you can still use some of the same tips and decorations on a buttercream iced cake!


Let's work from the top down. The "egg" topper is actually a egg shaped piece of fondant that I then covered with little cookie cutter flowers that I dusted with pearl dust and then attached with royal icing. Finally I put a dot of royal icing in the center of each one and placed pearl dragees into the icing. Green buttercream made for the perfect bed for the "egg" to rest on for the top of the cake.


The top and bottom tiers just use the same green buttercream and Cadbury Chocolate Eggs for trim. The middle tier uses this same trim along with eggs cut with cookie cutters out of different colored fondant and then mixed and matched with each other to make multi colored eggs for the cake. Finally I used little sprinkles shaped like bunny heads, chicks and sheep in the same colors as the eggs that I nestled into dots of buttercream on the cake. 


Because I only fully decorated the center tier, the cake keeps a clean and uncluttered look to it. If you decorated each tier like the middle tier it would look incredibly busy and over decorated. If you just used the trim with the topper it might look too bare. If I were to use these ideas for a single tier of cake I would make the center tier but leave off the topper and just use a few of the little dusted flowers sprinkled on the plain white top instead.


If you are going to make a multi tiered cake like this one remember that structure is everything in a stacked cake. You want to have at least 5 dowels placed into each tier to support the upper tiers. The cakes do not actually support each others weight, the dowels do that. If you are going to transport your cake you may want to consider a long center dowel placed into the center from the top to the bottom of the cake. Lightly sharpen the tip of the long dowel and it should go right through the cake boards all the way to your bottom board or drum. This will give your cake a lot more stability and save you the time and trouble of having to stack and add your trim at the venue. I, personally, have a Cake Safe (www.cakesafe.com) that uses this same idea for transportation and has been a life saver, and cake saver, since I often have to transport stacked cakes up to 200 miles away. 


If you find yourself in the position of having to travel such a long way to deliver a cake and you don't have a Cake Safe then just individually box each cake tier and stack them at the venue instead. Just make up a small kit with your tools and icing and give yourself at least an extra hour for stacking and trimming of the cake.


This week is our Cub Scouts Blue & Gold dinner so I'll see you next Sunday with photos of those cakes to share!

Cat