In this short video, Kim Patino of Coffee and Cakes in Frodsham demonstrates how to level, marzipan and ice a wedding cake.
Video Transcript
Hi I’m Kim Patino with Coffee and Cakes in Frodsham and on behalf of CakeBaker.co.uk I am going to demonstrate how to ice a wedding cake.
This would be the finished article, this is a two tier wedding cake, obviously half black and half ivory, so I’m going to show you how to flat ice – do the base icing for any wedding cake or indeed any birthday cake.
I tend to use white marzipan, the natural marzipan and you need to cover the gap that usually sits at the bottom there, because you’ve turned it over you’ve got the uneven bit on the board. So you just need to roll our sausage shaped pieces of marzipan and then plug the gap at the bottom, with one hand on the cake, the other hand can then push the marzipan in the gap.
You then need a standard pallet knife and with one hand on the cake just smooth it all the way round so it pushes it into the gap and you get a smooth side then for the icing and the marzipan to sit on.
You need to then roll the marzipan out for the top. You knead it a little bit until the smooth side comes to the top. It needs to be evenly rolled out and enough to cover across the cake and down the sides so you need to roll it quite big.
Then add a layer of jam on each side – this will help the marzipan stick to the cake. The jam also lets it slide a little bit and then you can manoeuvre it into the right place. Put slight pressure on it, but not a lot of pressure, you can just feel when it’s smoothed over. And then start working round the sides. Then start to trim the edge and just go straight in line with that. Right, we’re going to ice the cake now, we’ve covered it in marzipan and got it all ready to ice and we’re going to cover it with roll out icing. So we’re going to cover the cake but we’re also going to cover the board, so you need it slightly bigger than the marzipan you rolled out, as it has to come down the sides of the cake and cover the board so that none of the board will show.
You need to just place it, start at the front, over the top and then just let go and then you smooth it where it falls. So again, with the icing sugar on the top, start working down on each bit.
You just need to trim round the board then, so just feel for where the edge of the board is and with a nice smooth knife, not serrated, you start to work all the way round the board. And then use a smoother tool again, just round the very edge of the board just tidy any loose ends up.
Once you’ve iced your wedding cake, you can turn it into any design you like. This is just one tier bottom iced in white with black hearts and again around the base drum we’ve put black ribbon on. The second tier is on a separate thin board in between and you just ice that as a separate cake, literally sit it straight on top of the other cake and you join them with basic bead icing. Ribbon decoration, very simple design and again quite effective but that just gives you some idea what you can do when you’ve iced the base, there’s not an awful lot of work in that and it looks quite effective when it’s finished!
