The Bow tie Cake course I did is all about the decorating. Jackie supplies a 7 inch round 3 inch high mud cake to use, which is cooks herself. We are taught how to level and cut our cake to size, ready for ganaching. Then the chocolate is next. By using ganache you are able to get a pefect set finish as a foundation for your sugarpaste. Without ganache the end result would be lumpy and uneven.
Once the ganache is applied and leveled it is let set for about 15 min. The Ganache should go hard to the touch. Then using a hot knife or your hands, we made the surface perfectly smooth.
From here we applied a sticky glace then set the cake aside to roll out our sugarpaste (fondant). As the cake is 3 inch high and 7 inches across we needed to roll our 21 inches of sugarpaste. For every inch of cake you will need approximately 100gm’s of sugarpaste. So for a 7 inch of cake use 700g of Sugarpaste, we used a little more just to be safe.
It is important to kneed your sugarpaste untill workable. If there are any hard bits in it, make sure you remove these as it will make your rolled out sugarpast lumpy. Kneed sugarpaste until it becomes smooth and maluable. But not too much as it will begin to turn stringy and sticky. If your room temp and humidity is right, you shouldn’t need any cornflour or icing sugar to dust your bench. It is best to use a metal benchtop or a corian bench top. Marble is also good as it holds a cooler temperature. However this may work against you when you are doing decorations as it will make your paste set quicker.
Once the desired sugarpaste is rolled out we quickly apply it to the cake. Working quickly is essential as the longer it takes the drier your sugarpaste gets, which means cracks will appear. Once smoothed around the edges we used a pizza cutter to remove the excess. From her we now decorated our base with sugarpaste also. This gives a very clean and uniformed look to the design. It would look funny to have a purble and brown cake sitting on a gold board etc.
Now we moved onto the bow. For this we add some hardner to the sugarpaste to make sure it sets hard enough to hold its shape. But this means you need to work quickly as it will dry out. If you don’t work fast enough you will get crazy cracks all through your work when shaping your bow.
Then it’s up to you how you decorate the rest. Choosing two good base colours that match well will make the cake look so much better. I used purple and would have used more brown on the dots however there is only so many hours in a day. The day course started at 10am and finished at 6.30pm. Without all the explaining that Jackie does this cake would have taken me about 5 hours to decorate. It helps to have a nice cooled cake to start with too.
If I were to make this cake professionally I would probably charge $75 to $100 for it atleast. The cake is very rich in flavour and would easily feed 16 people with small pieces or 8 people with very large pieces. It’s not the ingredients that are costly but the time that goes into a cake. Jackie does use the very best chocolate which retails for about $20 a kg so the costs do add up.
I can’t emphasise enough how great a teacher Jackie is. She gives enough time for each student to perfect what they are doing and complete every stage of the process. This class was very hands on and best of all we got to take out finished master pieces home and with any left over sugarpaste. I think I’m going to make some lovely purple and yellow daisies with my left overs.
