Episode 19 – The Juicy Couture Cake

Episode 19
October 4, 2010
The Juicy Couture Cake

You are probably wondering what Juicy Couture has to do with cakes, let alone this blog – short answer: I made a cake for Juicy Couture.  Long answer?  Well, that’s what the rest of this post is for.

Recently, my friend Jaisyn became the store manager for the (at the time) soon-to-be Juicy Couture Outlet in Potomac Mills Mall and he asked me if I would make him a fancy cake for his store opening.  If you’ve been reading my older blog posted then you can probably guess that I hesitated but as you can see I decided the only way I would really get comfortable with more elaborate cakes (and expand my baking and pastry skills) was just to dive in and do it!

Now with this cake I decided to only use recipes that I was very familiar with and have done a few times recently so I used the Devil’s Food Chocolate Cake for the bottom tier, the Vanilla Chiffon Genoise Cake for the upper two tiers, and Vanilla Italian Buttercream (those links will lead you to the blog posts if you want the recipes use these links Devil’s Food Chocolate Cake, Vanilla Chiffon Genoise Cake, Vanilla Italian Buttercream).  I also reviewed the tips and tricks my friends told me by reading the posts from the Making a Simple Tiered Cake episode and the Covering a Dummy Cake with Fondant episode.  Since I used recipes and tips from previous episodes I didn’t record the baking of the cakes or the making of the icing but I will describe some of the issues I came across here so you can be prepared for it and be able to avoid them.

The cake pans I used were 3″ deep (bottom tier was an 11″ square, the middle tier was 8″ square, and the top tier was 5″ square) and one big issue I had was the more batter it took to fill the pan the more it domed up in the middle.  The reason this happens is that the edges bake faster than the middle (which is why wider cakes have this issue more dramatically that narrower cakes) and the way to avoid this is to bake at a lower temperature (which means a longer bake time – and this may not always be an option) but a popular option I’ve heard of is to use these “magic baking strips” that you soak in water and line a pan with.  This slows the baking of the edges down, but I’ve never used them – only heard of them – so I can’t really sign off on them yet.  However, by the time I finished cutting the dome off of the 11″ layer I had basically lost a 9″ cake (huge waste!) so if I find these strips I will use them!

Speaking of cake batter let me point out the batches I had to use to properly fill the cake pans.  The 11″ cake pan (The Devil’s Food Chocolate Layer) was the equivalent of five 9″ cakes (remember that to estimate how to come up with this is to take a 9″ cake pan fill it with water the way you would fill it with cake batter – AKA 3/4 of the way up – then pour it into the larger pan in question.  Keep doing this until you’re 3/4 of the way up with the large pan.) so I did two separate batches – one for two 9″ cakes and one for three 9″ cakes (by the way when I did the three batch I realized that the batter was a little thick, I went over the recipe and noticed I made a math error.  The corrected recipe has already been uploaded).  For the two upper tiers (the 8″ and the 5″) it came out to being four 9″ cake layers, so I did two batches of the two 9″ cake layers recipe.  Confusing?  Yeah, I’m not the best at wording things.  Here’s a more plain way of writing it:

• 11″ x 3″ = five 9″ cake layers
• 8″ x 3″ + 5″ x 3″ = four 9″ cake layers

Huzzah!  Math is power!  Anyway, on top of that I had to do two batches of the Vanilla Italian Buttercream recipe – has anyone else come to the conclusion that I need a bigger mixer?  Oh, and I noticed with the vanilla chiffon genoise batter that it was a little tough to fold in the meringue since the batter was so dense – if you have this problem too, add about 1/3 or 1/2 of the meringue to the batter on the mixer and beat it in.  Sure you’ll lose a ton of air cells but you’ll save your hand’s strength for the remaining meringue since it’ll also be lighter.  Also, don’t forget that if the air temperature is hot and humid the buttercream will never come together.  So if it’s soupy and you’re about to cry because you’ve been whipping it for an hour put it in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes and cool down the house.  Go back and whip it up and it’ll be good to go.

The episode picks up right after I cut the layers of the cakes.  Since so many of my episode go over how to cut cake layer I decided to leave it out of this one to save on time.  One area I need to work a lot on is getting my icing super smooth.  Remember that fondant mimics the surface it’s on, so if the icing is puckered and rippled then the fondant will show this.  Now, slight errors in the icing can be covered up but try to get it as smooth as you can instead of trying to calculate in errors.  Also, remember that it’s much easier to ice a cake with a cooler air temperature so save yourself hours of aggravation and turn your A/C on (or your heat off) and make the sacrifice for the cake!

Putting the fondant on the cake this time was much easier thanks to all the practice (and advice from my friends Katie and Sallee!) with the Wilton fondant and the dummy cakes.  Wilton fondant isn’t the easiest fondant to use so if you can cover a cake with Wilton fondant you can cover a cake with anything – so practice with Wilton fondant!  I know it sounds strange but think of it this way:  Learn to make bread by kneading dough by hand that way when you use a dough hook on a mixer you know what you’re looking for.  When you learn, try to learn with unfavorable conditions or stubborn product that way when you get the easier stuff it’ll be a breeze.  Wilton fondant for example dries out super fast (which is why it’s great for making three dimensional decor like bows) which is a huge minus for covering cakes but it teaches you speed and it helps you identify tears in the cake right away so you can fix them before they become unfix-able.  Then when you’ve mastered Wilton fondant switch over to the more elastic, more expensive Satin Ice fondant and you’ll be so happy how easy it is to work with you’ll tear up.  (Yeah, that’s kind of how I was)

Now that’s not to say that I didn’t have any issues with fondant at all.  Granted, covering the cake was so much easier this time but I did have a curve ball thrown at me – I decided to use chocolate fondant.  In the Covering a Dummy Cake episode I used Wilton fondant as I mentioned it dried and hardened really quickly (in an hour in fact) however Satin Ice stays moist and elastic longer.  Now I’m not sure if this coupled with the fact it was chocolate fondant made it more difficult to work with but this chocolate fondant never really dried!  I left the curls out to air dry for 24 hours and they never really hardened up.  If I were to do this again I would definitely make these curls a week (yes, a week!) in advance to make sure they are good and hard.  It’s nearly effortless to make curls and, on top of that, the more you get done ahead of time the better.  Katie and Sallee both mentioned using Tylose powder to encourage faster drying and trust me I used a lot (the average amount is 1 tsp to 1 baseball sized amount of fondant – this also makes it more like gum paste) but this stuff just refused to dry.  My advice is just give it more time to dry, even if you use the tylose.  You don’t want to have to use the curls before they are ready because you ran out of time and have a floppy and lopsided bow – though it didn’t really look all that bad, it was just the curls on the bottom were getting squished from all the weight.

Also, to save yourself more time with fondant bow making make it ahead of time.  First roll out a small disc of fondant, you want it to be smaller than the width of the cake AND smaller than the diameter of the bow so you can’t see it when you put it on the cake, and let that dry.  Then, use gum paste glue (very little gum paste gum powder with a few tablespoons of water) and build your bow by dipping the ends in the glue and placing them on the disc.  Just let the glue dry and ta-da you have a moveable, solid, pre-made decoration.  I do go over this in my video, albeit the fondant was still super soft.  By the way, you won’t be able to use buttercream to do this trick (because the moisture will melt and soften the bow over time) so either make the ends of the curls thicker or use a small ball of fondant to help give it some lift.

The polka dots were a little bit of an issue too.  At first we decided that dime-sized polka dots would look nice.  Yeah, do you know how big dimes are?  Well, I didn’t and when I put them on the cake it looked like my cake should be something in a coloring book.  So I took them off but the problem was that I just used my smallest biscuit cutter.  Then I remembered my chef in my beginner cake class taught us to think of our tools creatively – for example using your piping tips as cookie cutters!  And there you go, a smaller polka dot.  The tip I ended up using was an 805 tip.  One plus with the sticky soft chocolate fondant was that I didn’t need to use gum paste glue to stick them on the side of the cake.  I’ve also learned about myself that my idea of random isn’t always so nice so I made a more purposeful pattern for the polka dots – and I’m glad I did.  Notice too on my cake that the middle layer has few polka dots than the other two layers (I did the middle layer first).  When you do decorations, make sure to try and keep them as similar as possible – that’ll help increase their professionalism.  Little things like that most people won’t notice, but you and I both know the little things help give desserts that nice clean finished look.

Another issue I had was the pearl border.  I recap how to make the border using a mold in this episode, but if you remember from the Dummy Cake episode the pearls are supposed to pop right out.  Well, this chocolate fondant was pretty sticky and the store was pretty warm on top of that, so they were just refused to pop out.  I considered using shortening, although they could’ve made it worse, or cocoa powder, which is probably the best solution but I was also concerned about the pearls having a dusty finish.  I ended up just working with what I had but what was funny at this point was that the fondant on the cake had dried and despite how sticky the pearls were they wouldn’t stick to the cake.  Not a big issue with the top tiers since they could just rest on top of the layer underneath but I made a math error (really, again?) and the gold board was just too small to rest the pearls on it.  It would’ve been a lot easier if they would just stick to the cake, but I ended up just pressing them into the little crack between the cake layer and the board.

Now that I’ve thoroughly discredited myself (insert laugh here?) I hope that you enjoy the videos below and are able to pull something out of the demos.  I’ll be taking a break this weekend from the website but I’ll be back next time with a fan request episode: Petits Fours Glace!