Drip Cake - the low down on the learn!
I thought I'd have a go at creating a drip cake myself, after seeing a tutorial this week that uses watered down candy melts for the drip component.
I had three seven inch vanilla buttercakes in the freezer. I set out to build a mega tower, which would let me take my 30cm Perspex scraper out for a spin. As I built the layers I quickly realised I'd end up with a cake so high, it wouldn't fit in my fridge and I would have trouble getting someone to eat it. So I went for three layers of two centimetres each.
I painted each layer with raspberry jam, then scattered a few frozen raspberries across each. Then I spread 3/4 cup of what I'm calling royal buttercream - royal icing made from meringue powder with 500g of butter combined into it - onto each layer. Yep - that's half a kilo of butter. The amount of butter in this cake is staggering.
Then I made up a batch of chocolate buttercream. It's really important to state I don't put shortening in my buttercream. While adding a half a cup of vegetable shortening will make the buttercream slide better when you smooth it, to me it gives a horrible mouth feel and even more horrible aftertaste. If a cake doesn't taste good, what's the point, right?
So I began smoothing on my chocolate buttercream. I found anywhere it connected with the royal buttercream it separated. I put the cake in the fridge to firm the chocolate buttercream up, but my first attempt just didn't quite cut the mustard. I decorated this one with chocolate wafers and sent it to a good home.
I put a really bad crumb coat on my second cake and left it in the fridge overnight. When I finally plucked up the energy to plough on today, the buttercream was super solid. I had left the remainder out on the bench over night, covered in glad wrap. It was nice and soft so I beat it with the Kitchenaid and smoothed it onto my chilled cake. I find my buttercream recipe will not smooth easily. It's more suited to piping. The more I try to smooth it, the more dents and grazes and take off marks I get. So after a while I just took a hot knife to it.
I put it in the fridge and prepped the topping. I put a whole bag of blue Wilton candy melts into a mixing bowl with a quarter of a cup of water. Terrifying! This is what the tutorial said to do, but you can't trust anything you see on the internet!
I gave the candy melts three 30 second zaps in the microwave. I had to stir the mix so much to melt the chocolate, it ended up with a lot of air bubbles. If you've ever used candy melts for cake pops, you'll know they are gloppy when melted. The water thinned it out well. But not well enough, I think.
At the ready I had one piping bag of pink royal buttercream and one of mauve, plus some pink pearlescent bubblegum balls and some pink sixlets. I considered silver cachous, but they can turn black in the fridge and can make a cake look unsightly. So I left them out.
I spooned the warm candy melt onto the edge of the cake and pushed it over the side as the tutorial instructed. Because of its thickness, it didn't drip like Kathryn Sabbath's. In fact, it wanted to set really quickly, so repeated attempts to push it over the side only caused bulges.
I piped some royal buttercream puffs onto the surface and placed the gumballs and sixlets in a considered pattern on one side. The result is OKAY but I couldn't give this cake to anyone and feel good about it.
The lesson here, I think, is that a cake design which can seem thrown together is actually art in disguise. Kathryn Sabbath clearly has a secret drip ganache recipe that I'm not privvy to. If I were to do this again, I'd cover the cake in ganache, not buttercream. The interior looks spectacular, but this is an intensely sweet cake.
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