Recently, it was my dad’s 50th birthday, so I decided to take on the rather ambitious task of making him a drip cake. I say ambitious because I am not quite a professional baker, and I had exactly zero previous experience in making one of these cakes! After a LOT of searching and saving on Pinterest, I had a bit of a vision of what I wanted the cake to look like. I decided on a chocolate and gold theme, and this is how it turned out. Not bad, I have to say!
I then decided that I wanted to write a blog post about how to make these cakes, so when I made a cake for my brother’s 18th birthday, I took pictures of each stage. This blog post will explain how to make a drip cake from a non-professional point of view, with links to all of the recipes and YouTube tutorials I used!
There are a few baking tools that I would say are pretty essential to make this cake, although there are probably alternatives that would work too. These tools are:
Turntable
Palette knife (an angled one is best)
Bench scraper (or a similar sort of smoother)
Piping bags
The first step is to make the cakes. You can use just about any cake recipe at this point, but I went with Mary Berry’s chocolate cake recipe, which you can find here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/definitivechocolatec_72226.
My cake was four layers (it will look a little flat if you use fewer than four in my opinion), so I just doubled Mary Berry’s recipe and ignored the apricot filling part. Unfortunately, I only had one 8-inch cake tin, which meant making each of the four cakes separately. This took a LONG time, so I would recommend trying to find four cake tins!
Once the cakes have cooled down and ‘set’, cut the tops off each cake in order to make them even and flat. The easiest way to do this is using a turntable and the method shown in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hNxFPiW2OM.
Now it’s time to make the buttercream. I used this recipe: https://livforcake.com/simple-vanilla-buttercream.
Before piping each layer of buttercream between the cake layers, I put a bit of coffee (using a pour bottle) onto the layer of cake. This not only brings out the chocolate flavour of the cakes a bit more, it also prevents them from getting dry.
My mistake when making my first cake was putting the buttercream in the fridge before piping it on. This made it a lot more difficult to work with, and it didn’t stick to the cake as easily. I definitely had more luck with my second cake by not putting the buttercream in the fridge!
After you have piped a layer of buttercream between each layer of cake, the next step is the crumb coating. To see how to do this (as well as the next step) properly, I recommend watching this YouTube video – she explains and shows it really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgBdR08vlUo&t=880s.
This thin layer of buttercream holds in all the crumbs and ensures that they won’t make their way into the outer buttercream layer. Make sure it’s had time to fully set in the fridge before doing the main layer of buttercream. You could also just leave it as it is – the naked cake trend is still going strong!
Once the crumb coating feels fully set, you can move on to the outer layer. Again, I recommend watching the YouTube video I mentioned if you want to see the best way to do this! The palette knife, bench scraper, and turntable are pretty much essential here – they’ll ensure the buttercream is neat (and possibly even professional-looking!)
Leave that to set in the fridge for a while. The colder the buttercream, the better the ganache drip will work. Now comes, in my opinion, the most pressurising part: the ganache.
For the first cake I made, I used a ready-made chocolate ganache from Tesco, which just requires microwaving. For the second cake, I decided to make my own white chocolate ganache as I wanted to add food colouring. In all honesty, the ganache I made myself was probably easier to work with and less messy than the ready-made one! The recipe I used for the white chocolate ganache was this one: https://sugarandsparrow.com/white-chocolate-ganache-drip-recipe/.
I then used a blue food colouring gel, as I had heard (in the many YouTube tutorials I watched in preparation) that gel works better than powder. I was aiming for a subtle pale blue, but the food colouring gel was a lot stronger than I expected, so I ended up with a bit of a brighter blue than I had envisioned.
Once your ganache is the right consistency, I really recommend doing a few test drips on the side of a glass or bowl to check that it isn’t too runny or too thick. In the recipe I followed, she used a spoon, but I used a piping bag. As a beginner, I think piping bags leave less room for mistakes!
When you’ve finished doing the drips around the edge of the cake, cover the top of the cake in ganache too. Don’t worry about making the top too neat, as the next stage involves completely covering it with decorations.
The last stage of making a drip cake is my favourite part: the decoration. For this, there really are no rules or methods, and you can’t really go wrong. Once I had chosen a bit of a colour scheme, I just went around the supermarket picking up things I thought would look good (with a little help from the Pinterest board I had made!)
I also bought a gold powder spray for the first cake I made, and a silver powder spray for the second. Spraying things like Oreos or KitKats adds a bit of uniqueness to the cake and always looks good!
The fun thing about drip cakes is that you can completely change them up every time – you can try out different cake flavours, buttercream flavours, ganache colours, or decoration. Hopefully this post has reassured you that drip cakes are not reserved only for professional bakers, and has inspired you to make your own!
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