On Thursday it was Darcey’s birthday and what with one thing and another I had to make her cake in one evening! The day before I had finished off decorating a friends wedding cake which had to be driven to Poland. Can you imagine how stressful it is to make a friends wedding cake let alone make sure that it can survive a 12 hour drive! I was mega stressed out to say the least. I boxed it all up in double boxes. Loads of brown tape and tissue paper so it couldn’t move. The poor bride only got to see photos of it as I wanted to make sure it was really safe and bump/ swerve/brake proof.
I learnt a lot from that wedding cake including how to get the right ingredients for different size cake tins. (I’ll be sharing that with you soon). So I luckily had a 10″ cake that I didn’t use for the wedding cake sitting around. It wasn’t very deep, only 2″, so I decided to use it for Darcey’s cake and keep it simple and make her a ’7′. To be honest I was too shattered to do anything else – even though Tim said I should make her a Mike from Monsters University. Finishing decorating at 1am, 1am and 2am for the last three nights in a row was too much me!
How to make a number 7 cake
My girls are pretty lucky. They get to celebrate their birthdays two or three times each year. Once on their birthday, once with the family and once with their friends at their birthday party. This cake was for just the four of us to take with to a birthday dinner meal so it wasn’t supposed to be that big but a 10″ cake!!! I couldn’t resist.
I started with a 10″ Madeira cake which I levelled off. I didn’t want to fill it with buttercream so I did what my mum always does with marzipan (see below) I cut out a piece of paper to the same size as the cake then cut it into a ’7′ template.
Carefully I cut out the shape making sure that I kept the knife straight. I smoothed the top corner edges with my fingers.
Next I heated up some raspberry jam in the microwave until it was runny and covered the whole cake with it. I was pretty annoyed that I picked up a jam with seeds in but it didn’t seem to matter. The cake then had to be left till the jam had cooled down.
The cake was covered in a layer of marzipan. This is how my mum covers her birthday cakes. The combination on jam, marzipan and finally icing is just perfect. Most people want a layer of buttercream but we aren’t keen on it so much. The family tradition is much better!
The marzipan is rolled out between two spacers then is laid over the jam covered cake. It’s important not to let the marzipan get too thin as you wont have enough scope to ease it into the nooks and crannies of the shaped cake.
Smooth the top first, then work your way around the edges. I use my hands to get it all in place before I use a smoother. Marzipan is pretty sticky stuff so if you’re having difficulties lightly sprinkle icing sugar on your hands.
Gently ease the marzipan into the crook of the 7. This is where it can easily tear if you have rolled it out too thin. If it doesn’t feel like it will fit, lift up the excess that is on the flat in front of the crook and gently move it inwards. This prevents the pulling action over the cake and uses up some of the excess that you will be cutting away anyway.
Make sure the marzipan is secured against the cake right down to the cake board.
Smooth with a smoother and remove the excess marzipan. Tuck any loose bits under the cake with a side scraper.
Now you need to repeat the whole process for the sugarpaste. Give your marzipaned cake a brush with cooled boiled water so that the sugarpaste will stick to it. Roll out the sugarpaste and place over the cake, smoothing as you did with the marzipan.
Rather than add ribbon to this cake I decided to make it really bright and colourful. I made balls from sugarpaste which I wanted to go all the way around the cake. To make sure that they were all the same size I rolled out the sugarpaste between two spacers and used a round cutter to create pieces that were exactly the same. I then rolled them into balls and left them to air dry for a bit.
The balls were secured onto the cake board with a little royal icing.
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