Cake! magazine by Australian Cake Decorating Network August 2015 | Page 79

Written by Marianna Saran Their spectacular cakes and cupcakes are always meticulously covered in lush, fluffy buttercream, their designs continuously pushing decorating boundaries. Their careers came accidentally after creating sweet mothers’ day gifts for their beloved mothers. It was suggested they continue on this baking and decorating journey. A passion ignited and, as they say, the rest is history. The ACDN team were lucky enough to meet Valeri and Christina recently at the Cake, Bake Sweets Show in Sydney. They took time out of their hectic schedule to chat with us. When you started decorating, why did you choose buttercream as your decorating medium? Back home in the Philippines, we grew up celebrating birthdays and holidays with sheet cakes covered and decorated with luscious buttercream. We think 8 out of 10 Filipino kids can’t help to not poke those cakes when no one is looking to get a taste of that icing - of course we are one of them! Also, when we were looking for “easy” cake decorating tutorials, buttercream is the only medium that is easily sourced out and cheap too. What is the most important thing to know before working with buttercream? Buttercream is all about skills… and skills are honed through dedication and practice. There are not a lot of specialist tools when using buttercream as your medium so you also have to combine your skills with imagination, because this is the only limitation in creating new techniques or designs in buttercream. There is often confusion about how long buttercream lasts once applied to a cake and whether it can be left out of the fridge at room temperature. Could you please clarify this? In our buttercream recipe, we only use water to thin it down if we need too. Some use milk. If you use water, you can keep your buttercream for 7-10 days even if left out of the fridge. If you add milk, you can keep it for about 4 days. But of course, make sure to take into consideration what filling you put into your cake. If it is something perishable (cream cheese, custard, etc), then by all means, you should keep it in inside the fridge. When you do, make sure to put it in a box and cover with cling wrap all over. If you are taking it out, take to room temperature to thaw before you remove all the wrappings. This will ensure that your cake will not sweat. What is the best way to achieve deep colours when working with buttercream? First of all, avoid using powder colours for tinting buttercream because the micro granules do not easily get dissolved in it, unless you dissolve in water first which will make your buttercream to become too soft. We usually just use more amount of colour if we needed to make it a deeper shade. But for red, we usually mix even amounts of 3 colours – any dark shade of pink, then orange, and then finally, red extra or any dark shade of red. If it comes out bright red, then you can add a hint of brown or black. What do you believe are some of the benefits of working with buttercream? First of all, the ingredients to make buttercream are very affordable and you can easily get them from grocery stores. Also the sweet fact that buttercream is so yummy, you can also finish decorating a cake in such a short time. You do not need a lot of tools to create the designs because if you only have a couple of good colours, piping bags, tips/nozzles, the only limitation to your design is your imagination. But for us, we think that the BEST benefit in working with buttercream is that you can use it for decoration in ANY TYPE OF WEATHER. Especially in Australia where it gets really (really..really) hot, with our buttercream recipe, you wouldn’t worry that your cake will melt away. We recently did a Buttercream Heat Challenge in Arizona, Abu Dhabi and India wherein we left a cake outside for about 1-3 hours under the sun at 39C-40C and nothing happened. Next challenge will be in Australia!!