Eimear Hutchinson: Tips for making a cake for special occasions
Shot of a little girl having fun baking with her mother in the kitchen
WE have Confirmation this year, which for many might already be done and dusted.
Confirmation for this sixth class will be extra special, given the fact that their Communion fell within the first few months of Covid having arrived into our lives.
On the original date of her Communion, my daughter logged onto a zoom call with the class and the priest, who said a few prayers with them, and then we all wandered off collectively to try and make sense of the strangeness of the situation. She did eventually get her day out the following September, but it was still heavily influenced by the weirdness of the world at the time. It was a muted affair with talks of bubbles and pods, and I’m not referring to champagne and dishwasher tablets.
I relish any celebration with the girls that involves making a cake. It is something I decided, whether it was a clever move or not, that making a fancy cake was going to be something that each child would get for their birthday or special occasion.
I have made many cakes over the years, so from one amateur baker to some others, here are some of my tried and tested recipes and tricks for making the (almost!) perfect cake each time. Hopefully, they might be useful for any of you taking on the task of cake making ahead of some special occasions this Spring.
For the cake, I have two recipes that I use and that is it. I have tried others but if you want a recipe that you can make a few days in advance to give you time to decorate, and that will still taste fantastic on the day, there are only two options that work brilliantly.
The first recipe I use is the BBC GoodFood’s Easy Chocolate Fudge Cake. The oil in the cake adds the perfect amount of moisture and this is easy to make and stays perfect for up to a week, if it lasts that long!
The other cake I swear by is a merging of two – a rocky road meets a chocolate biscuit cake. This one is great if you don’t trust yourself not to burn a cake (although I have been known to burn the chocolate before when melting it!), although it’s definitely not the healthiest cake you’ll ever eat.
As well as digestive biscuits, I add chopped Twixs, Crunchies and Mars Bars and I also add mini marshmallows too.
I have long since stopped using fondant icing for covering cakes, it is such a tedious thing to work with, and you need to use marzipan or jam underneath to help it stick to the cake, and it’s just too much work for me.
Dipping a metal spatula into hot water before you work with the buttercream once it’s on your cake is probably the best way to get it as close as smooth as possible. I used to try and get it perfect but it took forever by hand, so instead now I use a variety of techniques like indented stripes or blobs and use the effect as part of the finished result.
Other ways of hiding your undulating buttercream are to cover the cake in chocolate fingers around the edges, and sprinkles work wonders.
If you are making buttercream, the proportions are usually 1:2 butter to icing sugar. Make sure your butter is nice and soft, a couple of seconds in the microwaves can help. If you sieve your sugar before you add it to the butter, it makes sure you have no small lumps of sugar encased in the butter rather than mixed with it.
I use a stand mixer for my buttercream and leave it beating away for a good few minutes to make it nice and fluffy. I have tried many food colourings over the years and find ProGel is the best for a good strong colour payoff. You can get them in SuperValu in Fermoy, so you can probably find them in lots of supermarkets.
A set of plunger cake cutters is a useful thing to have too. I have some stars in different sizes as well as butterflies and flowers, Homestore and More and The Range have good selections. Use these to cut out shapes from coloured sugarpaste, and sticking them to the buttercream is a really easy way to give the illusion of a professionally handcrafted cake. These work well on cakes for any occasion from birthday to communion and couldn’t be easier to use.
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