Welcome to How To CookThat, i'm Ann Reardon (s) and today we're experimenting with four different ways
of covering a cake with buttercream and I'm using this weird contraption and
I've gone the traditional scraper and turntable method for mine with a bit of
a twist and I'm experimenting with a slightly different style I've never seen
this before I just thought I'd experiment with a different method to
see if I could make one that was easier for kids and I'm using two of these. Let
me know in the comments below which method you thought was the easiest and
the best and which ones you've tried before or if you've got another way that
you do it let me know in the comments. So for all the cakes I'm starting with
vanilla cake and covering that in Jam and then a layer of vanilla buttercream
and then add a chocolate cake on top of that and continue to stack it up so
you've got four layers of cake. Then we obviously want to cover the outside with
buttercream that's what we're here for and if you use a piping bag with a big
flat nozzle that's probably the fastest way to get better cream on the outside
of the cake but you can just use a spatula to spread it on instead if you
don't have one of these. Getting a cake perfectly covered in buttercream with
nice straight sides is the starting point for most decorated round cakes
whether you're going to cover it in fondant or put other decorations on it
this is a key skill you need to be able to do. For the traditional method of
doing it you want to start by flattening out the top using an offset spatula to
try and make it perfectly smooth and flat. Then for the sides you just use a
scraper and rest the bottom of it flat on a turntable and turn your cake as you
scrape away the sides. Now if I put this in fast forward or skip a bit of footage
it looks like this is really quick but it does actually take a little while to
get it looking good. If you have any gaps just add extra to that part of the
scraper and go around again ... I'd say you should allow yourself at least ten
minutes to do this really neatly especially if you're new at it, it might
even take you 15 minutes just give yourself time to get it perfectly smooth and neat.
Obviously if you're decorating round cakes all day
every day then probably you could do this a lot faster than that but I'm
assuming that most people are not doing that. Now one common mistake lots of
people make with this method is they lean their scraper in as they're going ...
now if you get a lean it in your sides are not going to be straight. You can get
a fondant smoother that has a flat bottom and you can use that to hold it
up against the side of the cake and check if yours is straight. Unfortunately
these are not ideal for smoothing out buttercream because they don't have that
sharp edge so I'll show you you can see it's just dragging along the buttercream.
You could use this for the initial sort of shaping to make sure you've got it
sort of straight and then use your scraper to smooth it over once you've
got it straight on the edges first if you want to do that. The other thing you
can do that would really help with this process is add a round cake board to the
base of your cake and that just helps guide your scraper and makes it easier
to move your cake off the turntable later but if you don't have a turntable
and you don't have a cake board you can just use a flat plate or even a piece of
baking paper on the counter and spin it by hand but it's a bit slower and it's a
bit harder to get it straight and smooth. Once your sides are straight use a
spatula to push in any little bits that are sticking up on the top edge in
towards the middle. Method number two is using two perspex cake boards and one
sits on the top and the other one sits on the bottom. Now this one is too big
for this cake which will make it harder to get smooth sides but it also
highlights a major disadvantage of this method ... you're going to need to buy these
for every size of cake that you could be making. The reason they're perspex
instead of the covered card cake bases is because those ones tend to
have little bumps around the edge so you're not going to get it nice and
smooth. You can get really thin smooth cardboard ones but they're obviously not
very strong. I think that if I put perspex straight on top I'm not going to
be able to get it off again so I'm going to start by flattening the top and
adding a circle of baking paper and then my perspex
on top of that. Now for the fun part spin it around ... now having this one on
top means that you can't lean in with the scraper so assuming you have them
directly lined up on top of each other the cake should have straight sides. I'm
not sure if you can see what's happening here on the camera think you can but as
I scrape the sides and turn it around you can see I'm getting a gap at the top
underneath the perspex. So let's see if we can add some more
buttercream to fix that, just take off the baking paper add some more in and
put the baking paper and the perspex back on top and smooth it round again. But
look it's happening again now this may be because my buttercream is so thick
around my cake because the circles are too big for my cake. This method is
definitely quicker than it was without the two circles and after it's been in
the fridge you can see it looks put around the sides but as we already
pointed out the top is not flat. So let's try it without the baking paper and see
if we can get the perspex off after it's been chilled. I've seen people do it this
way with ganache but buttercream is a lot softer okay. OK, one hour later let's see
if we can get this off the top just run the spatula along underneath the perspex
circle and I can tell this is not going to work look the buttercream is just
getting ruined ... that is a bit of a mess! Well with this method the sides look
great and if you use baking paper under your circle you can just touch up the
top once it's chilled. Okay method number three involves using
a container with straight sides. Unfortunately my container is a little
convex at the base so I'm going to need to put a cake board at the bottom to
flatten that out and on that I'm gonna put a circle of baking paper so it
doesn't stick and around the edges I'm going to use some acetate. So to start
with line the base and the sides just at the bottom with icing and use a
spatula to spread that out, now if you use a clear container you can look at
the sides and check that there are no air pockets and you can see here there
are some lines there so just use your spatula to smooth those
out and then add in your first layer of cake. I've had to trim these cakes a
little bit smaller to make them fit so again you're going to need the right
size container for the cake that you are making. Add some buttercream between your
layers and then spread the blue frosting a little higher on the sides and add in
the next layer of cake and you'll notice I'm using Jam on the underside of the
cake instead of the top that just makes it easier to add it in without getting
jam all over your hands and you just want to keep going like that until
you've added all your layers of cake and then cover the top in a thin layer of
buttercream. Now this will actually be the bottom not the top so don't worry if
it's not perfect but because we're going to put it in a freezer you want to cover
it so that the cake doesn't dry out. And once it's been chilled for a couple of
hours you can then tip it out and remove the acetate and then peel off the baking
paper from the top. Now you can see I have a little gap there so I'll just
fill that in and because the frosting around the edge is frozen it's quite
easy to fix any problems without ruining the rest of it. The same goes for the
edges you can see they're not a hundred percent smooth because we've peeled off
the acetate but if you just run a scraper around the edge they smooth up quite
easily. This method it's pretty easy the only drawback I found is because we
froze it upside down the weight of the cake had settled that way and then we
flipped it the right way up so after about an hour we had a slight bulge at
the bottom of the buttercream but you could easily prevent that by before
you freezing it with the container still on flipping it on to a plate and
then freezing it that way with the container and everything still on it and
just follow the same method after that. The final method involves using a ring
and a circle that goes inside it ... it says to place it flat onto some baking paper
and fill the ring with frosting then use a spatula to remove any excess so that
you end up with like a disk of frosting and then place that into the freezer.
Once it's frozen it says to run a hot knife around the edge and remove the
ring and then stack the cakes on top of that so this will become the top
of the cake we're flipping it upside down like we did with the other one and
then put your circle on top ...this will be the base of our cake ... and cover the edges
in buttercream. Now with what the same problem is we had before the cakes are
too small for the size of the ring so you need to buy several of these if you
have different sizes of cakes but we'll give it a go anyway we're going to end
up with a big layer of buttercream. Then it says to run the scraper round the
edge now I'm a bit confused at this point as to what the purpose of freezing
the first rim was because we're now scraping away anyway it's got extra
buttercream on it from when we put it on the sides and it's not really having any
purpose we might as well have just put buttercream on the bottom and put our
cakes down and put a cake circle on top. Anyway it says to refrigerate it and
then once it's chilled we need to flip the whole thing upside down and peel off
the baking paper. Now that gives a nice flat edge to it and I like the edge but
I don't really see the purpose of having the ring just use one perspex circle. Let
me know in the comments which method you like the best and if you have an even
better way of getting quick, fast perfect buttercream share it with us all
in the comments I'd love to hear I'll pin the best one to the top. Click here
to watch more cake decorating tutorials here for chocolate and here for my mini
series. Make it a great week by baking something for a friend and I'll see you
on Friday 💕