After a seven-month break of no family birthdays, my cake making adventures recently returned. This time, I turned to Pinterest for ideas, and I came across a trend which I have seen quite a few times on the many cake-decorating Instagram pages I follow – the fault line. It definitely didn’t look like the easiest thing, but I decided to ignore the potential stress it could cause, and went ahead with it.
As with my previous cakes, I couldn’t find one recipe online which was exactly what I was envisioning, and so, once again ignoring the potential stress, I decided to combine a few recipes (and also alter all the quantities of the ingredients.)
For the actual cakes themselves, I made lemon cakes using this recipe: tasty.co/recipe?0=%2Fstrawberry-lemonade-cake&slug=strawberry-lemonade-cake&canonicalUrl=https%3A%2F%2Ftasty.co
As the recipe is for three 8-inch pans, and I was using four 6-inch pans, I called upon a reliable mathematical source (my brother) to find the quantities I needed. These were:
3 eggs
230g granulated sugar
93ml lemon juice
Zest of 1 lemon
181ml milk
215g plain flour
They were really easy to make and tasted really nice. My recommendation would be to leave enough time for your cakes to fully cool down before assembling them and decorating, as they’re a lot less stable when they’re still warm!
The next thing I did was make strawberry buttercream to go between the layers, as well as to cover the whole cake. This was the recipe I used: cupcakeproject.com/strawberry-buttercream-frosting/
Again, I increased the quantities of each ingredient, as the original recipe is for a smaller cake. Here are the quantities I used:
605g butter
15 strawberries
625g icing sugar
1 tsp salt
My tip for this is that if you find that the buttercream is too wet, keep adding icing sugar bit by bit until it is at the right consistency for you.
Now comes my favourite part – decoration.
The first thing I did was to cover the whole cake with a relatively thin layer of buttercream, which was the crumb coating. As soon as that was done, I stuck slices of strawberry (which I dried as much as possible with a piece of kitchen roll) in a line across the middle of the cake, alternating them between upside down and right way up.
If any of the strawberry slices are struggling to stick, I recommend trying to dry them a little more, and also using a bit more buttercream to help it stick to the cake.
I then filled in the gaps around the strawberries with some gold sprinkles I had, which just added a little something to it.
The next step is to leave the cake to set in the fridge until the buttercream has fully dried. Personally, I left it overnight, but you can definitely do less time than that, just until the buttercream feels set.
When that’s all done, it’s time for the final layer of buttercream. This should be a bit thicker than the crumb coating, and can be done either with a piping bag or a step palette knife, depending on what you find easier. Because this is a fault line cake, and therefore you have to spread it without touching the middle section where the strawberries are, I found it easier to use the step palette knife.
I started off by spreading the buttercream on top of the cake and then smoothing it out with a bench scraper, and then doing the same for the sides. Usually, I would smooth out the edges of the top of the cake so that it’s as neat as possible, but I wanted a more ‘rustic’ look, so I left them as they were.
Before finishing the decoration, you need to let this layer of buttercream set too, so put it back in the fridge until it has fully dried.
To decorate, I started off by painting the rough edges of the top of the cakes and the edges of the fault line in gold. I did this by mixing edible gold powder with lemon juice (you can also use vodka for this if you’re feeling wild.)
As there was already quite a lot going on around the sides of the cake, I wanted to keep the top simple, so I just added a few strawberries and gold dust-sprayed meringues. I also put a few on the cake base to bring it all together.
The final touch for this cake was the cake topper, which I got from eBay: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/PERSONALISED-Birthday-cake-topper-Any-AGE-ANY-NAME-18th-21st-30th-40th/264181536778?hash=item3d8272580a:m:mam25tURcf7C1cETPIeVatw&var=563736505354
I really recommend these! They add such a great touch to the cake, they’re cheap, and you can completely personalise them!
And that’s the whole cake! It seems like a quite a lot of steps, but it definitely looks like it requires more effort than it actually does. If any of you try this out or try out a different filling for the fault line, please let me know!
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