Welcome to the Cake Decorators Q&A

Hi,
I have orders for carved cakes but most of my customer request plain sponge with a buttercream and jam filling. I do lots of them and they turn out lovely but the finish is never as good at the finish achieved with gauche coatings. Does Paul ever do anything other than chocolate carved cakes? I haven’t come across any in the tutorials yet. I really want to know what to cover with to get a sharper finish?

Hello heathercargill

Paul has a tutorial on how to cover a cake with buttercream and fondant icing. If you look in the free section and scroll down you’ll see it. I think the cornellie cake is also buttercream. In my limited experience with buttercream I find making it stiffer for crumb coating sets a lot firmer. It can be applied in the same way as ganache. Once the excess is removed it can be smoothed with a hot palette knife to get a sharp base finish for the fondant to go on to. Chilling the cake before icing also gives a cleaner finish. Hope this helps.

I think this may have answered my question about attempting the golf cake in vanilla sponge with vanilla buttercream in replacement of ganache…would it be okay? …no jam though…

And I was going to make the BBC vanilla cake but without the syrup drizzle as a few people have said it’s a bit too sweet. What do you think?

Or should I go for a Wrights maderia sponge mix, which I’ve never attempted before?

Decisions, decisions! These things keep me up at night!