Cake Sculpting And Gum Paste Trouble
Baking By kirkland795 Updated 23 Jul 2018 , 2:07pm by SandraSmiley
Ok so Im wanting to make a whale shaped sculpted cake. I've never sculpted before and wanted to know what makes a good cake sculpting recipe? Obviously I don't want the cake to fall into a crumbly mess when I start shaping it. Any tips on this would be appreciated. I love baking from scratch when possibly and don't use cake mixes much.
Secondly I recently made a unicorn cake that came out awesome! I was so pleased. I ended up making the horn out of fondant. I originally tried to make the horn out of gum paste but the gum paste started to dry within 3-5 minutes of shaping it. I couldn't get the gum paste into the horn shape before it dried to much and looked like a terrible cracked mess. This was my first experience with gum paste and I used a powered mix that I added water to. What went wrong here? I know gum paste dries faster than fondant but I could literally only work with it for 1-2 minutes.
Any dense cake will be the best cake to sculpt/carve. Think pound cake. I add sour cream to my scratch cakes for a dense cake. And carving a cold cake is easier than room temperature. As for gumpaste, I’ve never used a packaged mix. For figures and embellishments, like your horn, I add a small amount of tylose powder to fondant to make a quick gumpaste. Lots of working time, and dries hard.
Unless you are dead set on using an all-scratch recipe, I recommend kakeladi's Original WASC Cake, which is a doctored cake mix. It is not only sturdy enough for carving, but is moist and delicious, as well. It is easiest to carve a partially frozen cake. Once you have the desired shape, it helps to stablize the structure if you coat it with melted chocolate or a strong ganache. I use melted chocolate. Once the chocolate has set, you can cover with buttercream, if desired. To help with getting the correct shape, print out your whale the size you want the finished cake to be, and use it as a guide while trimming. You can hold it up to your stacked cake to determine where you need to carve. Does that make any sense at all????
https://www.cakecentral.com/recipe/7445/the-original-wasc-cake-recipe
Gum Paste is not intended for large, heavy structures, but for the delicate, thin petals of flowers and other tiny pieces. The rapid drying time is advantageous for building flower structures, but it must be tightly covered when not in use. My go-to recipe for gum paste is by Nicholas Lodge.
https://sugargeekshow.com/recipe/nicholas-lodge-gumpaste-recipe/
As June said, the better choice for something like the unicorn horn is fondant with Tylose added. This type of structure needs to be made days in advance, so it has adequate drying time.
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