Welcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann Reardon and this is an episode of Cake
Rescue ✚ where I take viral cake fails and show
you how to rescue them. Fail number one is this cake by Pettie
Beige and she says it didn't turn out how she wanted it ...so
first let's recreate the fail so you can learn what
not to do when cake decorating you can actually learn a lot from your failures
along the way. It looks to me like the top layer she
had is slightly smaller than the bottom one.
If you don't have two cake tins the same size you can trim the bigger one to
match the smaller one and that way they'd be even.
next it looks like she's poured warm ganache over the cake which is a good
move, ganache is a mixture of chocolate and cream
and it's really yummy. How runny it is depends on how much cream you add in
proportion to your chocolate and obviously the temperature it is when
you pour it on. The warmer it is the runnier it's going
to be and once it's cold it sets. So let me just spread that a bit more so
we've got more down the edges like she had. At this point if she put it
in the fridge all would have been fine but it looks to
me like they've gone ahead and piped whipped cream on the warm ganache
which at first looks like it's going to be fine it's looking pretty good
but if i put this in fast forward you can see what happens...
the ganache is actually still slowly flowing down the cake
and it takes the cream with it. That looks about right to me I think I nailed
the fail. Step one to fix this cake is to
refrigerate it for at least an hour. Now that it's chilled i'm gonna
spread the cream around the side of the cake.
Now you can see that that ganache that was runny is now
set quite thick, all it needed was the fridge.
I'm going to clean up the ganache that is down on the base
and i'm going to add that into the gaps where the top cake is much smaller than
the bottom cake to kind of even out our sides.
now i know this looks really messy but trust me it's a rescue ...
sometimes things get worse before they get better!
next take a handful of flaked almonds and push them
into the sides of the cake. Scoop up the extra that falls off
and do it again. Now if you don't like nuts or you have a nut allergy
instead of almonds you could use flakes of chocolate here and just press it
into the sides. If you have any obvious gaps just pop an extra flaked almond in
individually until you're happy with what it looks like 😊
now that the ganache is set we can pipe cream onto it and it will not slide off,
so let's pipe swirls all the way around the top of the cake to hide the messy
edge then wash some strawberries hull them
and cut them into quarters. Place one quarter of a
strawberry onto each swirl of cream around the cake
and then add your candles on top and the cake is rescued!
No one would even know that there was ever a problem.
At number two we have a scary looking Elsa cake. Now this cake demonstrates
beautifully that piped character cakes are actually
really hard to do. To recreate the fail I'm going to pour
on some heated up blue buttercream. If you heat up buttercream it goes runny
like this so you can pour it over the cake
and then they seem to have some sort of color variation going on on top so let's
add a bit of a different color buttercream to that
too. The actual shape of Elsa's face that they have
seems pretty good to me. Now to do that you can easily
just put baking paper over a picture and then
trace it using compound chocolate. Once it's set you can then just lift that up
and put it on top of the cake so it gives you the outline.
So far so good but i think this is where everything seems to have gone downhill
they use a thick icing and try to color in the picture of Elsa
and fill in all the gaps which you can kind of get away with for the hair
but as soon as you go onto the face and you're piping it on like that
instead of it looking like a perfect flawless Disney princess complexion it
looks a bit more like a Shar-Pei puppy. Add a bit of pink for the lips and I've
made my fail somehow look worse than the original
but we can fix this fixer-upper with a little bit of love 🎵
put some coconut into a food processor blitz it up
and then let it snow. That Shar-Pei girl is gone.
Sprinkle with icing sugar to make it white so it looks more like snow
and then roll out some pale skin colored fondant.
Spray the back of a print out of your character with cooking oil so that it
doesn't stick to the fondant and put it on top and trace around the
outlines. If you're trying to do a character then
just search for a colouring-in sheet for them because that will give
you this really clear outline look. Carefully cut around the outside of the
shape and then peel off the paper and you can
now see those indents that we drew. Use your knife to make them a bit deeper
anywhere where it's just skin on skin like around the nose and the chin line
now repeat that process to cut out the eye shapes
and then put them into place and roll a ball of blue
and squash it on top and then do the same with a little ball of black
and pop that on top. See how that is much
easier in fondant than trying to pipe this on her skin has that flawless
disney princess look. Use food color to paint on her lips
and then use the template to cut out the blue dress
and the shape of the top of her hair. Make a plait out of yellow fondant
and add it in following the outline you drew so you know where it goes
a lot of people don't like the taste of fondant it just tastes
super sweet it tastes like a lolly without any flavoring if you add
flavoring to it like you'd add mint or musk or anything that doesn't have a
color to it unless the color matches so in this case you could
make it banana flavored then it's going to taste like a lolly so it tastes a lot
better. Put Elsa on top of your cake and this
is before and this is the same cake after ... so if you ever feel tempted to
pipe a character cake, go for fondant cutouts it's much easier.
At number three we have a badly cracked fondant cake.
Now that usually happens when the fondant is too dry or it hasn't been
kneeded enough before you go to use it. I'm going to add lots of extra icing
sugar into this one to try and dry it out. I don't usually roll out fondant
using icing sugar or cornstarch, I usually use the spray
vegetable oil to stop it sticking to the rolling pin and to the mat
underneath because then it doesn't dry it out.
This is quite dry this fondant but it still isn't cracking so to reproduce the
fail i'm going to have to just manually pull it down and make tears in the
fondant so that we get rips and damage that looks a bit like theirs.
That looks similar ... okay now to rescue it you could just pull the fondant off and
redo the buttercream and essentially start again but if you don't have time
for that let's look at another option. Firstly to fix that dry white
powdery look I'm going to spray the fondant with
cooking oil and rub it in and just rub gently to get rid of any
little white spots at the icing sugar that are there
because we want it to look a smooth one color. Now this oil will soak into the
fondant so it won't stay super shiny like this but it's going to
get rid of that dry look. What I will do is I won't spray the
sides so then you can see the difference the spray oil makes to the fondant.
Now for these lovely holes ... um let's make it look like they're supposed
to be there. Use a knife and cut around to continue a crack
the whole way around the cake using the holes that you already have as a bit of
a guide as to where it should go. Then press sprinkles into the exposed
buttercream. Now we've still got some work to do you
can clearly see the improvement the extra oil made to the dry looking
fondant, so i'm going to rub some oil onto the
sides too and there are still quite a few cracks
that are big and i don't want so i'm going to take some fondant
scraps and mix them into a paste using a little water. It takes a bit of
time to get this into a paste just press the back of your spoon into the bowl
and keep going until you get it smooth and then spread that
over the cracks. Now this doesn't work perfectly but it's okay. If you have
enough spare fondant you could have pulled off this bottom strip
and replaced it but i'm assuming that you either don't have time or you don't
have any more fondant so i'm making it a
quick fix. It's certainly not perfect but it looks
ready for a party. Now for a game of hide and seek ... can you
find a piping tip, two knives, a stand mixer, chocolate,
measuring spoons, a hinge, a match, a receipt and rose petals?
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things that you're stuck on. It's free to download I'll put a link
below, see if you can beat my high score on the first four
scenes. Now for cake fail number four this is when the person at the bakery
gets the order wrong! Some of these pictures have been
floating around on reddit for years now and i'm not 100% sure how
genuine some of them are. I mean look at this one ... they said they
wanted 'nothing' on top. Now you're telling me that the person at
the bakery baked the cakes covered them perfectly with buttercream
carefully piped chocolate patterns on top of the cake
and down the sides and then they put swirls of buttercream perfectly even
all the way around the top edge they sprinkled chocolate in the corners
and then after all that work without thinking they
piped 'nothing' in the middle with no skill at all?!
I just don't think so. But just in case you do make a mistake when you're piping
on top of your own cake or you get a cheap cake
that wasn't actually designed for your event and you want to change the writing
on it here's how to fix that. Spread out some white compound
chocolate to make it big enough to cover what is written on the cake. Give
the foil a little bit of a shake that just smooths off the top and then
just let that set. Put a sheet of baking paper over the top
and a print out of the text that you want on the cake.
Trace over it with a pen so you get an indent in the
chocolate. Now all that you need to do is trace over the indents that you made
using compound milk or dark chocolate. Now if you're not confident piping then
of course you can repeat this if you make a mistake because it's not actually
on your cake so you haven't ruined anything. Spread
out the writing that was on the cake so that it can't be red when you pull the
chocolate off but also so it's not visible through the chocolate.
Add your chocolate plate on top and problem solved. With thanks to my patrons
for your ongoing support of this channel it is so much appreciated 💝
You can watch more of the Cake Rescue series and other of my videos here.
Check out the new merch in the bar below. Make it a Great Week and I'll see you on
Friday.