Antonia’s dream cake looks amazing but it was actually quite easy to make. She’s been on to us to help her make a cake like this for over a year. I can’t believe it took us that long to get round to it and figure out a workable procedure.
Make the tiers
- Buy one or more plain cakes from a shop – or make them if you prefer
- Make a large, medium and small circle template out of paper and make sure you like the relative proportions and that they fit on your cake
- Cut out the circles with a knife and stack them
- (optional) we made a double layer for the first tier. We didn’t have enough cake to make the full circle so we cut out two halves from the left over cake, put them together, and filled in any gaps with bits of cake. It worked fine.Make the icing
- Make a large batch of icing. To do this, we just whipped up some butter in the mixer, added icing sugar till it tasted right, then a tiny bit of cream to adjust the consistency.
- Separate the icing into two or more bowls and add colour/flavour. We stirred vanilla essence into one bowl and melted chocolate into the other. The chocolate icing was too runny at first, but it soon reached the right consistency in the fridge.Decorate the cake
- Apply icing to cake as desired. Antonia used a butter knife to apply icing to the top surfaces. Then she used a piping syringe to pipe icing up the sides. She did the white stripes first, leaving a gap for the chocolate ones. In some places, she did all white or all chocolate. After one demonstration, she could do it by herself. The difficulty comes when you want to change colours. The ideal for children would be to have one piping syringe per colour of icing. Otherwise, and adult may need to help with the cleaning.
- Apply bought decorations of choice to cake, or candles or any decorations made at home.Last but not least
- Eat… but leaving it in the fridge for a few hours hardened up the icing a bit and made it even better.