subject: The Blue Orchid Cake Episode Or How I Use Fondant to Cover Tricky Cakes [print this page] The Blue Orchid Cake Episode Or How I Use Fondant to Cover Tricky Cakes
One of my jobs is to transform two dimensional pictures of cakes hotel guests bring me into reality. Oftentimes cakes look easier to make than they actually turn out to be. One situation comes to mind; the Blue Orchid wedding cake Episode (also known as How I use fondant to cover a tricky wedding cake). Since this cake consists of a square bottom tier topped with two round tiers, the first challenge was making a nice looking square cake.
Though it looks easy, unless you've made one, you don't know how much "fun" it is! The leveling and straightening on a square cake never ends. Just when you think you have it right on one side, you focus your attention on another side and find you have more work to do. In the Blue Orchid cake episode, one of my staff decorators set, iced and stacked the cake. My contribution was finishing the product; the fondant work and arranging the flowers.
At first glance, fondant ribbons seem easy to make. Fondant is the smooth, silky finish you often see especially on wedding cakes. Before it dries and hardens, it has the consistency of dry "Play Dough". In order to "surface" a cake, all one does is roll out the fondant and then lay cut strips on the cake. Sounds simple, right? Well, it is on paper but NOT in the real world! Fondant ribbons have a tendency to stretch out of shape easily unlike, for example fabric ribbon which always holds its shape. Since the bottom tier of the cake was a 12" square, I needed to roll out about 50 inches of fondant ribbon (twelve inches per side plus a couple extra as a safety factor).
I started out with a large "sausage" which I flattened to make rolling it out easier. Working in a professional kitchen, I have the advantage of using a dough sheeter to roll out my fondant pieces to uniform thickness. To keep the rolled fondant from sticking, I covered the fondant with a light dusting of sugar. I used a "powdered sugar sachet", which is simply a large piece of cheesecloth folded into several layers, filled with powdered sugar, and tied up to prevent the sugar from going everywhere. This method allows a just enough dusting of powdered sugar in order to prevent sticking but not so much as to leave powdered sugar splotches on the fondant. This was especially important, since I was working with colored fondant rather than basic white. I cut the fondant into 1" strips or about the width of a yardstick using a pizza cutter.
