The Contemporary Buttercream Bible (31 page)

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To create this cake…

• 15 × 13cm (6 × 5in) round cake

• 1.7–2.7kg (3lb 12oz–6lb) buttercream

• Paste colours: beige (Sugarflair Caramel), light

blue (Sugarflair Baby Blue), dark blue (Sugarflair

Navy Blue), orange (Sugarflair Tangerine), red

(Sugarflair Ruby), light brown (Sugarflair Dark

Brown), dark brown (Sugarflair Dark Brown), black

(Sugarflair Liquorice), yellow (Sugarflair Melon)

• Piping bags

• Palette knife

• Scraper

• Pen

• Ruler

• Scissors

• Greaseproof (wax) paper

• Sticky tape

• Printed patterns (see Templates)

• Baking sheet or any flat board

• Cocktail sticks (toothpicks) or headed pins

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• Styrofoam dummy cake, to match size of cake

• Writing nozzles 1–3 (optional)

• Cake stand or covered cake board

Crumb coat (see Crumb Coating in Buttercream

Basics) and place the cake on a stand or covered

board. Use the Templates supplied to create your

curved frozen buttercream transfers by following

the tutorial. You will need to colour the buttercream in the following quantities: 800–900g (1lb

12oz–2lb) beige and 100–200g (31⁄2 –7oz) each of

light blue, dark blue, orange, red, light brown, dark brown, black and yellow. Leave the remaining

100–200g (31⁄2 –7oz) of buttercream uncoloured.

Apply the patterns to the cake and then cover the

cake with the beige buttercream, smoothing the

surface to a perfect finish (see Smoothing in

Buttercream Basics). Pipe tiny flowers with the

plain and yellow buttercream (see Dots in Piping

Textures and Patterns).

Troubleshooting

Using frozen buttercream transfers is not difficult,

but there are some pitfalls to avoid, and along the

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way you might encounter some problems. Do not

worry – when we were experimenting we came

across them too, countless times. That is why we

thought we would show you some examples of what

might happen, remind you
not to panic,
and offer you our solutions.

THE TRANSFER CRACKS

If your pattern cracks (A), position it on to your

cake anyway, putting the broken parts as close to

each other as possible (B). Where the crack is,

especially if there is a gap, pipe a small amount of

the same colour of buttercream over it (C) and use a

small paintbrush to blend colours together (D).

Then when crusted, smooth it (see Smoothing in

Buttercream Basics).

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A

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B

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C

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D

SOME DETAILS DON’T TRANSFER

Most of the time, the reason this happens is that

your pattern is not sufficiently frozen and the

buttercream sticks to the greaseproof (wax) paper

when you try to peel it off (A). If this happens,

simply pipe over the pattern again in the right

colours, then blend with a brush (B). Even if you

worry that you are a hopeless artist, you will be able to manage some small details. Just blending the

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colours with a paintbrush usually does the trick. To

avoid this problem altogether, make sure that your

pattern is really frozen or apply a very thin layer of vegetable fat (shortening) to the surface of the

greaseproof (wax) paper before piping your design.

A

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B

FORGETTING TO FLIP THE

IMAGE

This problem is particularly bad if you are using

words, letters and numbers (A). The photograph

shows you what will happen if you forget to reverse

the picture to get a mirror image (B). If you’ve

already made the transfer before you spot your

mistake, there is nothing you can do but remove it,

or scrape it off, and re-do it again. You can print it out again or just trace your image on the

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greaseproof (wax) paper and do the frozen

buttercream transfer on the reverse side of the

paper.

A

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B

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Stencilling

Stencilling is the process of recreating a design on

the surface of a cake using a ready-made stencil.

This is an extremely easy technique. The grandness

of your cake will rather depend on the stencil that

you use. Shop around, because there are some

really elegant ones that are widely available from

specialist and online retailers.

1 For a 15 × 15cm (6 × 6in) stencil, put about

300–400g (101⁄2–14oz) of tinted buttercream in a

bowl and add drops of water to ‘thin’ it into an

easily spreadable, but not runny, consistency (A).

Then put it in piping bag and snip off the tip to

create a small hole.

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