Hot muggy weather is hell on buttercream.
Still, a lot of island-destination weddings and other grand events are planned for summer. Special cakes to mark nuptials, anniversaries, and birthdays, carefully constructed, decorated and set out to be admired before being carved up for consumption, are so vulnerable this time of year.
Buttercream, with its heavy butter component, easy to spread and holding its shape when piped into designs, isn’t the only tender element of summertime fancy cakes. A boiled icing will suck up ambient humidity and go granular in a heartbeat unless made by a skilled cook with years of experience and deft touch. Cheesecake cracks.
Fancy cakes scare the pants off me. My go-to frosting is chocolate ganache made from good quality chocolate bars or pellets melted with cream and spread smoothly over a cake before it has chance to think of some rascally way to mess up.
It’s not just frosting that can go awry. Most cake makers transport multi-layer cakes to the event disassembled…
I’m no good at all with the elaborate tips for pastry bags that make leaves, roses, and basketry patterns possible. For flowers, I scoot out to the garden to pick calendulas, nasturtiums, and borage blossoms, and use real mint leaves to decorate the tops of cakes.
Then I pray the cake is served before the posies wilt.
Skilled cake makers have other tricks to produce something beautiful in hot weather. One I know pipes on frosting until heat begins to soften the buttercream whereupon she rushes the frosting, cake and all—maybe even herself—into a cooler until she can work with the chilled buttercream again. It can take hours to get the cake done this way.
It’s not just frosting that can go awry. Most cake makers transport multi-layer cakes to the event disassembled and construct it with drinking straws inserted to stabilize the layers. Often each layer is composed of a couple of layers.
One bride planning her wedding here on island asked for fruit sauce spread between layers instead of more frosting.
As the reception wore on that warm evening, with a slide show following the bride and groom from babyhood to the present and several lengthy toasts, we waitstaff anxiously watched as the cake settled into itself, and vertical cracks in the layers appeared, oozing purple and red juice. Stopping the festivities in barely enough time, the couple finally cut the cake and we raced in to carve it up before it fell apart. It was a perfectly delicious mess.
Another island wedding, a high society one with many formally dressed attendees, including a sprinkling of foreign dignitaries, and a tall, gorgeous cake, suffered a similar situation with the bride and groom circulating to greet guests, lengthy speeches, and too long a delay before the cake cutting ceremony. That cake gradually began to lean like the Tower of Pisa.
Professional servers hired for the occasion, amplified by island wait staff, watched in horror, and finally two of them raced to the cake table picked it up and moved it carefully to the center of attention which brought the dithering to a halt and the cake was cut in the nick of time. The bride never got a piece to eat. The rumor was that a slice left for her in the house pantry was snarfed up by wait staff.
My favorite cake disaster story is when a professional baker hired a staff member to transport a cake to the reception venue in his van. Now the driver had a large hairy dog who often accompanied him in the van, though, of course, not on that wedding day. By the time he had arrived and was bringing in the cake, a lot of his pet’s fur had blown around in the van sticking itself to the frosting.
The kitchen crew spent way too long picking dog hair off the cake and trying to repair the frosting. Little wonder the venue proclaimed that henceforth, carefully covered sheet cakes sufficient for the whole reception accompany each fancy cake in case of some disaster befalling the showpiece.
Here is my favorite, deceptively easy ganache recipe. Do not use cheap chocolate chips which won’t melt smoothly. Acquire more costly chocolate— Callebaut or some 70% fat chocolate.
Ganache
- 1 cup of heavy cream
- 9 ounces of chocolate, broken up if in a bar
- Put the heavy cream into a shallow pan over medium high heat. When it just begins to bubble, take it off the heat and add the chocolate.
- Stir then let it stand until the chocolate softens and whisk to spreading consistency.
- Spread over the top of the cake with a spatula and push it to the edges until it sags. Smooth out the sags adding a little more to cover as needed.
- Eat the rest.
Sandy Oliver is a food historian who gardens, cooks, and writes on Islesboro. She may be contacted at SandyOliver47@gmail.com.
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