Sparkle Wedding Cake

Recommended Tutorial for Sparkle Effect on Fondant by Crazy Cakes Almeria 

The Story behind this Cake

Having baked and decorated cakes over 30 years ago when my children were little, there was a huge gap until about 2 years ago when I rekindled my love of all things to do with cake!

Living in Spain, there are not many bakers here who create the cake styles that we are used to enjoying for celebrations. A few friends asked me to make them birthday cakes and as I started to look at the amazing creations now in fashion. I joined forces with my daughter Emma, and we enrolled on a decorating course which is on-line with Paul Bradford.

The sparkle cake which we created was for a young lady getting married in Mojacar here in Spain. It is a lovely beach resort and the theme was “Bling”. She wanted a clean cake, with lots of sparkle, and it took us quite a while to work out a finish that would catch the sunlight properly and create that incredible effect.

We were asked for 3 tiers, one of fruit, one vanilla sponge and one lemon. The base cake I baked using a recipe that I have made for 35 years. It is a luxury fruit cake, packed with fruit and it has never failed to come out perfect, no matter what size I have baked. For the “sparkle” cake, I made a 10” round, which took 6 hours to bake and weighed 4kg. The middle tier was the vanilla sponge filled with vanilla butter cream and strawberry conserve, and the top layer was the lemon sponge, filled with lemon butter cream and our own lemon curd made using the lemons which we grow here in our citrus orchard at Olive Tree Farm. Each cake was iced using Satin Ice – White / Vanilla which is a joy to work with.

Emma spent hours researching how we could create the finish on the cake. We searched the web, but to no avail. In the end we ordered various edible glitters in different shades and started to do trial runs on how to get it to stick to the cakes. The final choice for colour was Hologram White Rainbow Dust and we used two  5g pots.

Our first few experiments were disastrous! We made a glue using Tylose, which was too gloopy and the glitter effect was uneven. We tried damping the fondant slightly, but as it dried the glitter didn’t stick. We tried 2 air brushes, which the glitter unfortunately blocked. We finally mixed Vodka to water and it took us a few more trials to get the ratios correct.

The next puzzle was how to damp the cake lightly, but quickly enough to add the sparkle evenly, and our usual paintbrushes were not doing the job! A quick trip out to the local paint store resulted in Emma finding some lovely soft bristled brushes. One was used to damp the icing, and the other to add the glitter.

We worked quickly under 3 spot lights. Emma developed a tapping motion for the tops, and a flick for the sides, and just kept going over and over the cake. We had them sat on turntables, which was then sat in a large plastic container so we were not wasting the glitter that escaped the cake. Finally we had the exact effect we were looking for, an iridescent crust.

We left them to dry over night in our air conditioned studio, and then on the morning of the wedding we stacked them very carefully, touching only the very bottom edges where the rhinestone ribbon would cover, just in case the sparkly crust should damage.

It was over an hours’ drive to the venue and the outside temperature was 32 deg Celsius. The air conditioning was on full blast the whole way there. When we arrived at the restaurant and unpacked the cake from our polystyrene cool box, a small crowd of people suddenly gathered round, all asking how we had made the cake so sparkly. Everyone was oohing and aahing and taking photographs.....Steve Homer, local food photographer waited his turn patiently, before moving in to do his thing, and Stacy the wedding organiser was thrilled...... at last we could breathe a sigh of relief.

Vendors
Photography - food odyssey
The wedding organiser - Weddings in Spain

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