It was a really gloomy day around here today (Wednesday as I write this) and I thought I would decorate my cake for Christmas. I have been diligently feeding it since I baked it and I was afraid that if I left it any longer it wouldn't get done. Christmas is less than a week away after all!
This year I took the easy route and didn't do anything complicated. I am not the most skilled person in the world when it comes to sugar craft. I ordered a cake topper and ribbon from an on line cake supply company back in October. Easy peasy and I love the rustic look of a red vehicle with a tree on top!
The first step in decorating/icing your Christmas cake is filling in the holes that inevitably show up, being left behind from raisins, etc. that drop out of the cake. I just pinch off little pieces of marzipan and stuff them into the holes. This results in a much smoother finish for the fondant you will be adding at the end. Once you have the holes filled, you need to brush the cake all over with smooth apricot jam which you have heated in the microwave to loosen it. About 30 seconds does the trick.
You know when I was rolling out the marzipan for putting over the jam, I never noticed any lines it it, and neither did I notice them on the cake, but I can see them in this photo. Weird that. Anyways, you need to roll out a quantity of marzipan thinly and then place it over the jam coated cake. I roll it out on a surface dusted with icing sugar, with an icing sugar dusted rolling pin. Once you have it the right size then carefully lower it onto the cake and down the sides of the cake, gently so as not to tear the marzipan, and gently pressing it against the cake so that it adheres.
Once you have done that you need to brush the marzipan layer with some water all over and cut off any excess marzipan from around the bottom of the cake.
I cheat and buy my fondant ready rolled. Its so easy to use, and has a perfect consistency in thickness throughout that I have always had difficulty getting when I do it by hand.
You lay your fondant over top of the damp marzipan and again smooth it all down to get it to adhere and keep it in place. Once you have done that, you can burnish it a bit with the palm of your hand to make it shine and trim off any excess from the bottom all the way around with a sharp knife.
And that's it. You can now decorate it however you want to decorate it. I made a quantity of Royal Icing and iced the small cake board that came with the cake topper. I wanted it to look like snow.
I also added some glitter sugar snow flakes and some cake glitter that you can just about see in this photo, but cake glitter flakes are very difficult to photograph. I put some of the snowflakes around the top of the cake also, and added some bottle brush trees and holly berries.
I covered a square place mat with aluminium foil and affixed the cake to that with a bit of royal icing as well, so it wouldn't move about. The cake topper had come with a nice piece of ribbon, in a generous length.
I put that around the cake, affixing it at the back with a couple of glass headed pins. I did not put it all the way to the bottom because I had in mind to put a length of glitter snow garland around the bottom. So I put it roughly centred around the circumference of the cake.
Once I had that properly affixed, then I put the snow glitter garland around the cake at the very bottom, which did a great job of finishing things of nicely. I was really pleased with how it turned out! The whole exercise didn't take me much more than an hour to do and I thought the finished result was exactly what I was looking for! Merry Christmas!
You can see some of my other Cake finishes from past years here and here. All very simple I can assure you!
