How To Make A Carousel Cake

After I shared my carousel dessert table, I received a lot of emails and texts asking how I make carousels, so I thought it would be easier to put together a post and share our experience. I and you. During the 2 and a half days of making the cake (yeah that long!) I took random pictures of the “pie in progress” and I’ll post them here so you can get a better idea of how I do it. I want to add that I am not an expert at anything ???? I just love to make beautiful things and to achieve them I try to get as many tips as I can from websites, blogs, tutorials, etc. different leads. This is what did for me so I wanted to share it with you and hope you enjoy this beautiful cake too!BASIC THINGSFirst of all, I decide on the size of my pie. I used 2 x 18cm and 1 x 22cm vanilla sponge cakes. Because the cake is so stable, I just filled the layers with some lemon curd to give it a lovely fresh taste.Then I covered each cake (a portion from the top one, I’ll explain why I left that out later) with white ganache. The reason behind this is that when you cover the cake with ganache and then with fondant, the result is a much neater cake. Personally I find ganache easier to smooth plus when you put the cake in the fridge the ganache gets firmer and it stays just as smooth. If you use butter cream you will have different lumps and for me it was very difficult to smooth.TIP: You can find a great tutorial on how to coat your ganaches here. After my cakes were covered with ganache, I covered them with white fondant and then I stacked the 18cm cake on top of the 22cm cake.TOWERI decided from the start the only inedible part of the pie would be the tower in the middle. At first I thought to use a kitchen roll and cover it with fondant but then in one of my cupboards I found a cardboard bottle and I quickly thought it was PERFECT to make a medium tower heart. In fact, when I put it on top of the 18cm cake, it was so proportionate to the other measures, good luck for starters I guess!As you can see from this photo, the tower looks very bumpy, that’s because I tried to cover it with fondant but it still retains the air bubbles! Bored, I tried 3 times to cover it up and then my husband suggested using only white paper to cover it up: AMAZING!As I mentioned before, the top cake is not covered with ganache but just fondant and the reason behind it is that it doesn’t have to look perfect since it’s already fully decorated after this, so a less work. do!CONEHere is the tricky part… cone.. pls allow me to say cone BLOODY!! I made the base of the cone with markers and tried to make it proportionate to the size of my cake but then it was so hard to cover it in fondant! I was thinking.. either I’m using a very cheap fondant (to be honest, I use the Tesco brand but it always works great!) Or this is very hard to do! I did, let me think 4/5 tries to cover it with fondant.. each time it broke on the top…Once I rolled it around it wasn’t big enough so I had to start over, roll it and try again.. and again.. I almost gave up, I swear! Then it magically worked! I rolled a large round white fondant then set the cone to one side and rolled the fondant around the cone. I guess it doesn’t matter if the two fondant pieces don’t mix perfectly as you can always make the back of the cake! Read more: How to lubricate a garage door openerTIP: If the fondant breaks on the top of the cone, simply add some fondant on the tip and flatten it with the rest. When finished with all the decorations around, I promise no one will notice (Are you? Eheh) Once you’ve got your cone, be sure to make a long fondant “sausage” to place around the base of the cake. This will ensure that the cone won’t move away from the base and you have a place where you can attach more decorations. Remember the “less is better” rule doesn’t apply to carousels, in fact in this case the more you decorate, the better the result! I make long fondant pieces, then I smooth them out with a finer cake. I know, you need to be patient.. very patient but they will be perfectly round. Then, like the other decorations, I dusted them with gold.TIP: To make the top cake more stable, I glued its cardboard base to the top of the tower using some super attack glue.DECORATIONSThe difficulty of this cake is that you cannot prepare many decorations in advance. In fact, if you prepare fondant decorations days in advance, they will harden and when you try to put them on the cake, they will crack and not bend to the shape of the cake. , various plastic molds and a horse biscuit cutter.MISTAKE Number ONE Please don’t be sad like me haha. At first I cut the fondant as long as the length of a plastic cutter but that meant when I put it on a cake you could see different gaps between the stripes because I couldn’t join each stripe together. perfectly (see picture below. So instead, please press the frill cutter on the fondant, then lift it up and reposition the first stripe. I should probably make a video to show you how to do it.) show you more… let’s make a long one anyway!After you create all the stripes, it’s time to get the golden beige lines. To get yellow is a bit difficult. The first time I followed some (obviously wrong!) (and I have this picture to prove it lol!). So I had to dismantle everything and start over…Thank God, my lovely chubby uncle came to my rescue and created a light beige color. We then dusted the gold luster on EVERY trim. I have to say, this part took a long time and we ended up having our kitchen covered with metallic dust, itself coated with gold powder and probably just the right amount it was worth. out must have! LAUGHMISTAKE NUMBER TWO: Because I was worried that when I finished brushing the stripes with golden dust they would become hard, I started attaching them to the cake and only then did I dust the metallic dust. Please DO NOT do this as it is nearly impossible to avoid some of the iridescent dust falling on the white fondant pieces, and once it is there you cannot remove it! I made various decorations using plastic molds and powder coating with golden dust.TIP: Please remember to brush some cornstarch onto the plastic molds and tap them to remove excess before you press the fondant into the mold. This will make the decorations easy to appear. Read more: how to plant trees in stardew valleyWe made some small fondant pearls that were decorations used for the bottom tier and these pearls were covered with too much metallic dust.To attach all the decorations to the cake, I brushed each item one by one with some edible glue (if you put a lot on the pieces tend to slide down the fondant layer!) and glued them to the cake with my our creation.TIP: make your own edible glue! To paste the icing on the cake, mix some tylose powder with some water and it’ll be pretty in no time, ready to use! The only thing I prepared in advance were the ponies that I cut out of fondant a few days before and decorated them with some sort of royal frosting. My husband still thinks they look funny because they look like they have wigs on their heads! LAUGHBecause the horses really didn’t want to stay in place, we glued them to the pole using super attack. We just have to remember our guests don’t eat them! For the posts, I used cake pins. They are the perfect height for my cake so I didn’t need to cut them, I guess this is AGAIN a bit of beginner luck! On each dowel we slightly twisted the sausage with golden fondant and let it dry.It’s a bit tricky getting the right measurements to get the pins into the wheel. The pins should be equidistant from the tower and positioned so that the left side of the wheel mirrors the right side.Once we fit them, we then place the top floor on the tower. Now we just need to worry that it is centered well (otherwise it will fall when we move the cake) and that during the night the cat won’t jump on it! I think I took this picture at 1am… Aaaaand breaaaaaaaaaaaath….I hope this guide is helpful. Feel free to share any comments with me and ask any questions you may have as I’m sure I forgot to explain something! My son’s birthday is already a special day and this cake makes it even more special so I really hope you will try to make a carousel to make your celebration one. lovely memories!Read more: How to make spelunker potions