Covering a cake with sugarpaste

By CakeableSun, 09/06/2009 - 17:07

Covered cake

Covering a cake with sugarpaste gives you a beautiful, flat, smooth surface to work on, plus you can use all sorts of effects in the sugarpaste to add interest to your blank slate.

The thought of draping a soft, easily torn sheet of sugarpaste over a cake is a bit daunting though, so lets go through it step by step (I'm doing it on a little cake here, but the same principles apply to a full size one)

 

Roll out the sugarpaste

First, roll out your sugarpaste - here I'm using some red and yellow marbled paste. it can go quite thin - down even to 3mm if your cake doesn't have sharp corners or bits that stick out! You shouldn't go too thick as it'll be difficult to drape, and you'll likely have spare icing around the sides. for a normal circular cake about 4mm is great - it gives you some leeway for stretching over knobbles, but not so thick you have loads of spare at the edges.

I'm rolling out on a non-stick silicone sheet, but if you're rolling out on a glass or wooden board you need to make sure that you keep the surface well dusted with icing sugar (or to keep the colours bright, use white fat).

You need to roll out enough to cover the top, and both sides of the cake - so for a round cake that's the diameter + 2 times the height. For a square, it's the width of the cake + 2 times the height (you can pleat and discard the excess at the corners)

sugarpaste picked up on a rolling pin

Apologies for the foggy pic! To pick up your sheet of rolled out sugarpaste, you need to carefully wind it onto the rolling pin. This is the bit where it can slide off and end up back in a crumpled heap on the board.. so keep an eye on it as you wind!

Before you do this, you need to make your cake sticky so the sugarpaste will stick. A 50/50 solution of water and jam (apricot is the classic jam to use for this, but others are fine too - seedless is better!) brushed all over, with particular care taken on the edges.

sugarpaste draped over the cake

Take the sugarpaste over to the cake (best to keep the two close so you don't accidentally drop the sugarpaste on the floor) and unwind it over the cake. Make sure that you line up the bottom edge of your icing with the bottom edge of the cake - otherwise your sugarpaste will be wonky!

Covered cake, half smoothed out

now you need to just carefully stretch/squeeze the sides to smooth them out. If you're covering a square cake flatten down the sides towards the corners, then squeez out the corners in a pleat and cut the pleat off.

Finished covered cake

lastly, trim off around the edges. A nice sharp knife makes this easy - if you let the sugarpaste dry for 10 minutes or so you might find it drags the icing around on the cake less.