I'm making my first wedding cake next week for a friend of a friend. She wants 2 tiers separated - easy enough. the bottom tier to be fruit which i'll cover in marzipan and fondant - that's no problem.
But, the top tier is to be a plain sponge and whenever i've tried to use fondant over a buttercream covered sponge it looks lumpy.
Can I use marzipan as a base? Would it taste wierd? What's the best way to stick it to a sponge?
Or should I try 2 layers of fondant?
ha ha ha! I apologise for the dodgy terms! I'll have to learn the American cake lingo, but sponge is what we call it - great isn't it!
yes i think you would call it white cake, madeira maybe? Made with butter, flour, sugar & eggs. I don't know what goes wrong but it never looks as good straight on a buttercream base compared to a marzipan base.
Yes, yes...tell me more I love those cake terms...fun to learn! I'm still trying to figure out why your sponge cakes turns out lumpy with buttercream and fondant? Do you apply a thin coat of buttercream? And what kind of fondant to you use? Marzipan...help me out...what is it? Ingredients? Have you looked in the cake gallery at pictures of fondant cakes? Are they more smoth than yours?
Well I can't offer any help - but I did have a question if you don't mind 
When you cover a cake w/ marzipan & then fondant - do you use anything for icing? Is there really no icing, just two "coverings"? I can't imagine how this would taste........
Good luck w/ your sponge cake. I just tried to make a madeira cake for the first time and it came out dry & horrible and I had to toss the whole thing in the trash 
Hope yours comes out much better!!!!
I'm in England too. I usually just apply a thin coat of buttercream under the fondant and it looks fine. You can use marzipan if you wish but most people won't like the taste of it with the sponge. If you use marzipan just stick it down with apricot jam or glaze, just the same as if you were covering a fruit cake. i think I would go for the too layers of fondant
Yeah i thought it might taste weird with marzipan. I'll go with 2 layers of fondant then and pray it looks ok. I'll post a pic next week when it's done!
Rhondie
I can't remember the exact ingredients of marzipan cos I buy it ready made - it's basically made with almonds and you cover a fruit cake with it before you ice it.
Why do you need two layers of fondant? It's not a case of 'needing' two coats of fondant but sometime if you do 2 layers it is easier to get a smooth levle covering
I don't think a lot of people understand just how different things are in texture on either side of the ocean. I'm from the USA and when I moved to Ireland, I was pretty surprised at how different the cakes and icing served over there were from back home. The cakes are much denser and not as moist, and the icing seems creamier. Same thing when I moved to Luxembourg. I started buying from a German bakery over there and yet again the cakes and icings were all a different texture. I asked my baker in Ireland why they were so different, even when using a recipe I had from home, and she just shrugged her shoulders. I guess the ingredients are just slightly different. The eggs are smaller, but that's the only real difference I could find.
Either way though, I just love cake. I never met a cake I didn't like. It's just funny because things I did while overseas baking are just slightly different now that I'm at home. Cakes are more moist (sometimes a good thing, sometimes a royal pain in the rear) Fondant is softer (but tastes worse, to me) and buttercream is less creamy but sweeter.
I'll probably never figure it out.
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