Some kind of recognizable cake. Soft & fluffy. Perhaps from a mix to make it uniform for all competitors.
Buttercream icing. Fondant would be forbidden.
Food coloring. Strictly to color the cake or buttercream.
No non-cake internal supports of any kind. No dowels, no wires, no PVC, no foil.
Could cool and interesting things still be made, or would it be a parade of two-layer sheet cakes with nifty flowers and piping? When I asked this of Food-Network-Challenge-addicted better half, she looked at me like I had three heads and said “even regular ol’ wedding cakes have dowels!”
Well OK … fine. So what I’m curious about is essentially a ridiculously minimalist cake contest, to counter the huge amounts of artifice I see in the conventional cake contests.
So, what are the limits of what can be done with straight-up cake and icing? Could it be sculpted to any appreciable height (not necessarily the 36" normally required on the cake challenges)? Could you still do 3-D shapes and characters of some form (e.g. “laying down” on top of the cake instead of standing)?
I wish I was at my mother’s house … she has a great Betty Crocker cookbook from the 1960s that is all about the fun and fancy cakes for parties. All of the cakes meet your requirements. The biggest difference is that they aren’t as tall as the cakes on the Food Network, because they were intended to be made at home by normal people, so they are more normal sized. Having made some, I think you could increase the size for dramatic effect if you wanted to.
However, they really look terrific and are not that hard to make, although they take more time and patience than just a plain cake mix cake.
I would be much more interested in watching your competition than the ones on Food Network.
I have never seen the show. But every year we bake cakes for my kids´ birthdays and it has become quite the event around here. The planning goes on for some time before that, because people in Holland do not eat cake as far as I can tell other than the occasional pound cake. So the supplies are very hard to get and we are cast back upon primitive methods, to wit, we have to make things ourselves. And I hate fondant.
We have made castles and undersea panoramas and penguins skiing down mountains and houses and piles of presents and…all kinds of stuff. I think all of our cakes comply with your rules, though I would have to ask if candy would be disqualified, as we used peppermint sticks as supports for a Candyland cake. And meringues for the ice creams.
So it can be done. You only have to be stranded far away from any Wilton´s supplier and you´d be amazed at what you can do.
Agreed. Looks great, tastes at best “meh”. I have heard mention of something called “buttercream fondant” – if that really and truly tastes like buttercream, maybe they’re on to something.
No meringues or candy, sorry. Although those are very much within the spirit of a minimalist cake competition – at least those items are pleasantly edible.
Well, if you are making a Candyland cake, some, er, candy is likely to be involved.
But if buttercream is the only thing, then I expect we would really have to work at it as even for the mountains cake we used royal icing for the penguins and the skis, and cookies for the trees. Actually, I think we have never done without royal icing somewhere, I don´t see how you could stick things together or make figures. I mean, I am confident it could be done but it would be a lot harder. Er, softer. Well, buttercreamier anyway.
OK then. So my proposed contest wouldn’t have much in the way of sticking things together or little figurines.
What does that leave us? Pretty flowers and piping? Can we perhaps get creative in “2-D”? You could do a big sheet cake with really detailed pointillism, for example.
I would be tempted to include anything the typical person would be likely to eat on a cake, so I’m all for candy. Of course, it’s your contest … but I think you would have a lot of fun with adding candy elements. One of my favorite cakes from childhood was a Noah’s Ark that featured animal crackers.
Candy, animal crackers … things typical people are willing to eat for dessert.
PVC, fondant … not really.
Are you allowing sprinkles and coconut and other traditional cake decorations? Personally, I don’t care for coconut but I get that it is an actual food that real people use in deserts. And you say buttercream icing instead of fondant, but what about other kinds of tasty frosting?
Nope – sticking with just the three ingredients in the OP. I’m OK with any buttercream-based frosting. I thought “chocolate” frosting, for instance, was just buttercream frosting flavored and colored like chocolate.
All of that other pleasantly-edible stuff you mention will be in the next episode
There is certainly buttercream frosting that is chocolate (yum!) but I couldn’t figure out whether you were going for the “fondant is gross, so it has to be a good tasting icing” or if you have some passion for buttercream in particular. If it’s just about tasting good, you’ve got icings like ganache, which has a cream base (but no butter), and cream cheese frosting.
Yup, all you’d get is a bunch of two or three layer cakes with pretty buttercream roses, and that’s about it.
Part of that is because you specify that the cake must be soft and fluffy. Those kinds of cake don’t really handle stacking well, so the bottom layer would be completely crushed under the weight of the upper layers without the help of dowels for support. On the other hand, if a sturdier type of cake like genoise was permitted, you might be able to get a bit more height, since they’re dense enough to handle the extra stacking (though even then, it’s unlikely that you’d get any significant height using just cake).
Also, while a talented baker can pull off some very impressive stuff with buttercream and a piping bag, you’re limited to surface decoration only since the icing is too soft to be sculpted or molded into complex three-dimensional shapes. Besides, a giant mouthful of pure buttercream is pretty gross.
The best way I know to do designs in buttercream involves doing an outline in black icing on a drawing, then freezing that, then taking it out and piping in the colors, then freezing the whole, then laying that on top of the cake. When it thaws it looks like you did it freehand and everyone is very impressed.
You can also do quite a lot with cutting up a sheet cake – pretty much anything you can do with tangrams, really. But I expect that what you would really get would be a lot of cakes made in specialty pans with buttercream stars on them. You can get a specialty pan in the shape of anything from Elmo to a gothic cathedral to a castle to a football stadium.
You could, but I would not. You would probably have to freeze it to make it firm enough to work on, then do your cutting, refreeze it, then frost it. The reason is that as soon as you break that lovely golden brown surface, a soft, fluffy cake will violate all the laws of physics by giving off more crumbs than there actually is cake, ruining your frosting completely.
This problem also appears when you cut up a sheet cake, but usually you can turn the pieces so the cut side is down or at least facing into another one thereby hiding the cut surface.
With a soft, fluffy cake it would pure freaking hell to get a sharp edge on your carving, if it were even possible. You’d probably get better results with a thick, dense cake, but your edges would still want to crumble and crumb and be a general pain in the ass. Maybe if you made a big sheet of just insanely thick frosting, separate from the cake, you could freeze it, carve it out, refreeze it, and then slide it on top of the iced cake. You wouldn’t have nearly enough time to do that during the typical competition, though, without a blast freezer.
I’m a baker professionally. I haven’t participated in the Challenge type cake contests, but each year the performing arts center has a gingerbread contest, in which all ingredients, including internal support, must be edible.
I’ve found that for support work Rice Krispies treat material makes an edible substitute for, say, styrofoam. And it can be molded into different shapes, left to firm up, and used as needed.
I doubt this material satisfies the OP, but it could work for those who want cakes to be all edible, with no plastic, wooden, or artificial internal bracing.
If you want your cake burned away, sure. It wouldn’t smell very nice, though, if the smell of using it on flesh is any indication. And I think you’d have a hard time controlling how deep it cut without something to block the beam, even on low power.
