It’s the day before the wedding and you are almost done making your 3-tier Ivory Striped Wedding Cake.  You will have bought all the bits and bobs you need, made your gum paste roses and baked and iced your cakes.  Now we will start decorating the cake.  In this post I will cover covering the cakes in fondant and adding the Ivory Stripes.

The rest of the decoration will need to be done on the day, AFTER you have assembled your cake.  We will cover that in the next post.

Covering your cake in fondant

These are the amounts of fondant needed to cover each cake.  Obviously you will need to use more fondant than specified to make extra sure that you have enough to cover your cake.

A nifty trick I learned from The Sugar-Coated Chronicle is to add a dollop of shortening and a splash of glycerin to the fondant when kneading it.  This helps prevent the fondant from cracking once it’s on the cake.  She has a really good tutorial on working with fondant, so head over there if you feel like being educated a bit.

So go on and knead your fondant with some shortening and glycerin (not much) until it’s nice and pliable.  Roll it out to the size specified above for each cake.  Make sure your fondant isn’t too thin.  About 1/4″ will do.  And make very sure that your work surface is well covered in icing sugar.  You don’t want your fondant to stick!

Take the relevant cake out of the fridge and brush with a tiny bit of water.  This will help the fondant to stick to the now-dry icing.

Roll the fondant up onto your rolling pin and drape over the cake, making sure that you have enough fondant overhanging on all sides.

Smooth the top of the fondant onto your cake with your smoothers or your hands.  Do this BEFORE smoothing the sides, as the weight might make the fondant tear otherwise.

Now gently smooth down the sides, lifting the fondant and pushing it towards the cake as you go.  I have neither the patience or the inclination to write this part out, so have a look at THIS awesome tutorial by FieldsofCake to see exactly what to do.

Trim away all the excess and voila.  The above link is excellent and I use her method of trimming the excess exclusively.  It is much neater than tucking the excess fondant under the cake.

DO NOT PUT YOUR CAKE BACK IN THE FRIDGE!

You will notice that the fondant starts to sweat towards the end of the smoothing process.  If you put the cake back in the fridge, it will do that again, and more so, when you go to remove it for stacking.  So don’t!

Put the cake in a cake box and keep at room temperature.  If it’s very hot where you are, put the cake in a room with a fan/air con so that the fondant can dry and set.

Repeat for all 3 tiers.

Making the stripes

Prepare your ivory fondant as above.

Roll it out to 1/4″ thick on a well-powdered surface.

Using your metal ruler, cut strips of 1″ x 5″.  The number of strips per cake is stipulated below based on a distance of roughly 1″ between strips.  You can cut more or less depending on if you want bigger or smaller gaps.

Once your strips are cut, turn them over so that they are smooth side down.  Lightly paint the backs with water and adhere to the fondant-covered cake, starting at the base of the cake and moving up.  Make sure they are nice and straight.

The easiest way to make sure that you do not end up with an odd-sized gap at the end, is to do the north and south stripes first, i.e. do one stripe, then do the stripe at the opposite end of the cake.  Fit the remaining stripes on each side between these two.  On the 6″ cake you will have 4 stripes on each side of the north/south stripes.  On the 8″ you will have 6, and on the 10″ you will have 8.

Put the cakes to bed in their cool and airy room and go to sleep yourself!  Try not to stress about the fact that tomorrow you will drive a dowel into the heart of your cake!  All that’s left to do now is to stack your cake and add the finishing touches.

Happy Baking!!

xxx Dedri

Remember to subscribe to my newsletter if you would like to be kept in the loop.  You can also like my Facebook page or follow me on Bloglovin.