Cake-A-Month - December - Post 3

In the last post I made my cakes and layered them with cherry brandy buttercream frosting. I forgot to mention that I wrapped the cake up and placed it back in the freezer after this. The next step was to frost the cake with ganache and I'd read that this was easier to do with a frozen cake.

I made my ganache in the microwave using 2 parts of milk chocolate melts to 1 part of cream. When I was trying to work out what type of cream to use the articles I had read said to use whichever type of cream you use to make whipped cream, which here in Australia is usually thickened cream so that's what I grabbed in the store. The morning before I went to make the ganache though I read a bit more and discovered that thickened cream wasn't recommended because they add gelatin to it and the carton of pure cream was preferred. I crossed my fingers and used the thickened cream anyway and fortunately it worked perfectly.
I ended up using the ganache recipe instructions which were on the back of the packet of chocolate melts, which was the microwave method. Worked brilliantly and the ganache was to die for!! I put it in the fridge overnight to harden it up so it was a frosting consistency to spread on the cake - otherwise the ganache is too runny and ends up being a pouring version.

Mmmm, all gone now!

So I frosted the frozen cake using an angled 10" spatula, and held the metal blade under hot water for a few moments to heat it up, then used that to smooth the frosting. I was able to get pretty sharp edges and smooth sides using the ganache, very very impressed with the results of using ganache instead of buttercream for this stage!

This ganache was so damn good, I was tempted to roll around in a bowl of it!!

Once I had covered the cake in ganache I put it back in the freezer and got started on making the decorations for the cake. Even though I live in Australia and Christmas is essentially in the middle of our scorching hot summer I wanted to decorate the cake with snowflakes to keep with the Christmas theme.
I'd been looking at Sweetopia's blog and her beautiful sugar cookies and was inspired. Even though I was making a cake and not cookies, I decided to take that inspiration and pipe some delicate snowflakes onto wax paper with her royal icing recipe and transfer them to the cake rather than piping directly onto the cake. I'm not a very good artist and don't trust myself to do designs free-hand so printed off some basic snowflake designs to place under the wax paper

Pretty little snowflakes

 You can just see the printout I used at the top of the picture. I got most of the printouts from Knuckle Salad, although I also used another image from one of Betty Crocker's recipe's.

It took the better part of an entire day to pipe out the snowflakes, but they turned out so delicate and beautiful, it was definitely worth the aching hand!! I left them on the wax paper overnight to set and harden then in the morning used my angled cake knife to gently lift them from the paper as I pulled the wax paper down over the edge of the table like in the photo above. That way the edges started to peel off the paper by themselves before I eased the knife under.

I had piped out about twice as many snowflakes as I thought I would need because I was expecting most of them to break as I tried to lift them off the wax paper. I was very surprised to find that I only broke about 3 out of the entire batch! And one of them was because I dropped it in shock that it had come off so easily lol!

I stored them in an airtight Tupperware container till I was ready for the decorating stage.