Yesterday's cake was my first attempt at sugarpaste-covered cake. It was a lot easier than I had expected - a nice surprise there! It was also the first trial cake for a close friend's wedding in May. I've promised to make her cake, and we're slowly figuring out the details. This cake had chocolate layers, and a mixture of crème fraîche and cream cheese beaten stiff with homemade strawberry preserves in between. I used a raspberry buttercream (from the Cake Bible) to cover it all (and that was just excellent by the way - extremely tasty, and simple to make) and then sugarpaste on top. I went slightly crazy with the icing - see, I just won a set of Wilton decorating tips on Ebay, and I wanted to try them out. Piping icing is *fun*!
The actual wedding cakes will be quite simple - all white, with a border of stars or flowers at the very bottom, and then fresh, dark red roses to decorate. Possibly the odd icing design too, to cover any mistakes in the sugarpaste. The cake will be chocolate and raspberry - I'm thinking a dark chocolate ganache for one layer, and a strongly flavored raspberry mousse. Will have to experiment further!
Anyway. While on the subject of piping, I have to point out these lovely brown sugar meringues that I made a week or so ago. So simple - I used four egg whites and about 60 g of brown sugar per egg white (a total of 240 g). Just beat the egg whites until they start to thicken, and gradually add the sugar until you have a very glossy and stiff mixture. Pipe it out (or just dollop out with spoons) and bake in a fairly cool oven (130°C) for about an hour. Turn the oven off, and leave them to dry for at least an hour, or more. (Overnight is fine.)
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