Annezca: How to: Ice a Buttercream Ruffle Cake

I usually bake a cake for my own birthdya each year and I like to try something a little different each time. For a birthday shindig on the 19th of December I baked a multilayer rainbow cake. While browsing the baking section at a Chapters/Indigo on Boxing Day I found a ruffle cake and thought how cool would that be to do for my own cake!

Scroll down to see how I did this step by step:

We went to Earl's for my birthday, I took some nice scenic photography of the cake:

Slicing into the chocolate cake:

These were unique candles from cake mate (rainbow candles!) that light up according to what the color of the candle (i.e. red candle burns a red flame, green candle burns a green flame) really neat!

Using a few simple tools, some Pinterest inspiration, a youtube tutorial and some patience I was able to create this easy to make buttercream ruffle cake. Read below to see how I did it.

Buttercream Recipe

Follow the vanilla buttercream recipe which creates nice frosty buttercream that holds its shape well

Cake Recipe

For this particular cake I used a decadent multi-layer chocolate cake recipe that I've used in the past for previous cupcakes.

Tools:

Bench scraper (or a tool to mark straight lines into your cake)
Piping bag
Petal Tip (Wilton Tip #124 for larger ruffles, #104 for smaller ruffles - I used #124)
Cake Spatula
Optional: Rotating cake stand made it much easier to pipe everything instead of physically rotating myself around the cake.

Ice your Multilayer cake first

I review how to do this in another tutorial.

Create a thin "Crumb Coat" Layer on your cake

Next, create a thin layer of icing on the outside of the top and of the sides

3. Your crumb coat should look something like this. I tried to keep this layer as thin as possible:

Use a Bench Scraper to make 1 inch markings

Mark your crumb coat with straight lines 1 inch across (or whichever size you prefer to use on your cake

Use Petal Icing Tip (Wilton #124)

Or Wilton tip #104 for smaller tips:

Pipe your Ribbon Columns

Start at the bottom, with the wider end closest towards the cake and pipe in one direction, and then the other allowing the ribbon to fold one-on top of the other:

Continue until you reach the very top:

Do this all around the cake, try to make the size of each ribbon consistent:

This is what you should have so far:

Piping the top:

Pick a column of ribbons to continue from, with the wider tip facing towards the center of the cake, create a ripple effect trailing off towards the center of the cake. This was extremely hard to photograph (baking and self-photography while baking can be very challenging with only 2 hands!) so here's a screenshot from the Youtube Tutorial I used:

Continue doing this all the way around:

You get a beautifully pointsettia like pattern, and voila you are done!

The cake was quite delicious and the cake slices are also very pretty when you slice into them too! I excitedly explained to the waitress how I did the cake and she decided she would like to try it too.