Frou-Frou

Textured White. Australian Cake Decorating Championships (ACDC) held as part of the Cake Bake & Sweets Show in Sydney at The Dome, 21-23 March 2014.

It all started with finding out about the Cake Bake & Sweets Show (CBSS) in December 2013. A whole bunch of excited cakey emotion that basically went like this - Oh look! It’s in March, in Sydney, we can go! Hmm… tickets. Three day pass – bought, done. What’s next?

Wonder what’s happening at the show… Duff Goldman (Charm City Cakes/Ace of Cakes), Sharon Wee and Sheryl BITO are going, along with tons of other professional stars. Okay, let’s track down the timetable so we can see everyone ten times over. Ah, no timetable just yet. What else is there to do?

Well hello there cake decorating competition. Rephrase that, scary cake decorating competition. The Australian Cake Decorating Championships presented by Cake Boss (Carlo’s Bakery, Buddy Valastro… anyone?) to be exact. Not exactly scary, more terrifying, daunting and a bit of a challenge. Why? It was marketed as the WORLDS most expensive cake decorating completion in terms of monetary prize value.

So far just reading through the schedule of what is required in the cake and sugar art sections. Doesn’t seem too scary. I would classify in the “Open” category – less than two years’ professional experience, semi-professionals, non-professionals, hobbyists and apprentices. Theme. Theme is ‘A Spring Wedding’ (for a traditional bride). Let’s just note here that ‘traditional’ was not overly emphasised, sigh. Not even two months before the Show and we’ve decided to enter.

Wedding cakes; spring wedding; floral wedding; colour wedding; coloured wedding; romantic wedding; and every other girly chic wedding out. Pintrest was visited, a selection of wedding magazines purchased (which scared Mr. Sammy Sprinkle), wedding dress designers viewed and home furnishings. Yes, you did read that right. A theme that stood out amongst wedding dresses and home furnishings are textures. From silky to rough, pleats and frills, and plenty of flowers; this is the direction our cake was headed.

Frou-frou is the word used to describe the sound silk makes as it brushes against itself. Frou-frou is also associated with girly, feminie and soft. What else is frou-frou-esque? Ruffles and frills, of course! Time to design.

Okay, enough talking. Here are some pictures of the cake ‘in the making’.

Foam Fakies. It is safe to say all competition cakes where possible are made from polystyrene foam dummies. This allows for the maximum amount of time spent decorating. After all it is a cake decorating competition.

Here is what we should have done before we bought the foam. Forgetting that the ruffles of tier 3 would make the cake look two inches bigger than it really is… Live and learn lesson learnt right here.

Three of the four tiers covered. The tier on the silver stand is pre-marked for its frills.


 

The start of the 10 hour process to ruffle the entire tier. You can see little bits scrunched up paper towel in the left picture. This holds the ruffle shape until it is “dry” enough to hold itself. I would like to note right here that without my pasta machine this would have taken an infinite time to complete. Thank you pasta machine. The right picture shows the smallness of each ruffle.

Oh, and this is the tier with the frills. Commonly this is actually known as ruffles, and the pic above are scrunch ruffles. Trying to keep it simple with ‘frills’ and ‘ruffles’.

The little indents in the fondant covered base board are water marks. Fondant = sugar. Sugar + water = melted fondant. Board must be recovered (neatness of board covering is a criteria for the competition).

Playing with the idea of filler flowers. These should be called forever flowers, as they take forever. (Buds n Petals Cakes of Sydney coined that name).

Making a backup supersize rose. Could you image if there was only one and it broke!

So whilst it’s all white, because that’s traditional isn’t it, we found this divine vintage-stone-lilac grosgrain ribbon to wrap the base board.

Just a few tools used for flower making plus with a cup of cold tea.

Setting up the cake at the Show. I think it was all done by this stage.

 

Here is the finished cake! And a rare photo of Sammy Sprinkle.

The results – overall we scored quite well and just missed top 10 of the 37 entries in the Open Wedding cake category. The theme was not met enough to receive more than half the marks in that section. Taken in stride though as this is a cake I would want for my wedding over the peach and mint green old(er) fashioned cakes our grandparents prefer.

Well, there it is! The White Texture cake in all its glory.
And we didn’t even get to talk about the three jam-packed days of the actual show itself!

X Sammy

www.sammysprinkle.com.au