I have been caking for 2 years, so you would think by now I should have it down..right...wrong! For the life of me I can not get my buttercream smooth and even. I do the "viva" method for smoothing, my problem is the buttercream is always uneven causing it to look lumpy. It's not really bad, but I notice it. What really made it stand out for me is that I did my first "faux" tier for a x-mas wedding cake. The bottom is faux and the top square tier is cake. The bottom looks fantastic and my tier looks...well.....lumpy! I have seen the Shugarshack DVD..I use some of her techniques, but I still have issues...

What do I do? How can I master this?

I haven't been doing cakes very long but have noticed that if I make the buttercream a day or two ahead of time, it smooths on much easier. I also recently starting using one of those big putty knives instead of the Wilton spatulas and it works amazing! Now my biggest problem is getting the frosting too thick on the top! oh well....practice, practice, practice!

I have switched to using the huge icer tip to get an even coating of icing on the cake. It helps

I would recommend using an icing tip to put your buttercream on the cake. It gives you a fairly even coat to start with and then you can use Sharon's techniques. I would also recommend using a fondant smoother instead of your hands when you are "viva-ing" the cake.

I do mostly buttercream work (folks just don't like and won't pay for fondant) and I have definately improved over time.

I'm a huge fan of my plaster/drywall knives I buy from Home Depot. I start off with a relatively hot knife and then spin the bezjeebies out of the cake.

The plaster/drywall knives are in the contractor section of HD and Lowe's.

HTH

I use my bench scraper because you can rest it on its flat side on the turntable. This puts the long edge you'll be using at a perfectly straight vertical along the side of the cake. The you just hold the scraper in place and spin the turntable. Perfect straight edges every time.

Don't have a good conecctiln to look at pictures. But if ur fake cake is fine, and the reall cakes aren't, is the problem more that u get a bulge where the filling is?
xx

thanks for the replies....I will try the icer tip next time!

I don't have buldges in the cake, I have uneven spots....Like the top is never quite even with the amount of BC...then when I lay fondant on it, you can really see it. I just went to HD today for the large bench scraper, hopefully this will work better then the tiny one I have.

In my early days, what i noticed I was doing was icing to the shape of the cake. i thought I had to have an "even" layer of icing, meaning it should be, for example, 1/4" thick all the way around. So if I had a dip in the cake (uneven leveling), then I'd have a dip in the icing. If the corners on a square cake were lower than the center, then so was the icing.

Once I learned that I can use the icing to fix the bumps and hollows, everything went much smoother! (Pun intended!!!)

My favorite tool is the bench scraper to get icing on smooth and even.