Folks who know cakes: how would Food Network cake-making challenges turn out if ...

[joebuck20]

@CrazyCatLady

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.

Howabout on Ace of Cakes where they’re carving up cake all the time and then frosting them up? Do they just use a sturdier variety of cake?

[bordelond]

@joebuck20

Howabout on Ace of Cakes where they’re carving up cake all the time and then frosting them up? Do they just use a sturdier variety of cake?

You know … I think I could deign to allow freezing of the cake

Also, I shall by fiat lengthen the time limit from 8 hours to 48 hours. The whole point was to see what could be done with simply good-tasting cake/icing and without non-edible gimmicks.

And … I can find it in my heart to allow brownies, genoise, and other types of cake in. The “soft & fluffy” in the OP was meant strictly to disallow “trick cakes” that set like cement or something. As long as it’s recognizably cake of some kind and is pleasant to eat.

[acetylene]

Thanks for the link Tamex, that was hilarious.

I too am sick of their reliance on fondant. It looks great, but it seems like cheating, somehow.

[elfkin477]

@Mahna_Mahna

Yup, all you’d get is a bunch of two or three layer cakes with pretty buttercream roses, and that’s about it.

Nah, they’d just have to go old school like the book delphica mentions. I don’t know if it’s the same book, but we have a sixties cookbook with a similar theme - how to cut up cakes made from mixes into interesting shapes. (I presume they need to be frozen before cutting) There are all sorts of things they’ve done in the book, from kid shaped cakes to dinosaurs to bunnies. All with diagrams to show you just how to cut the layers in order to make kid bodies, dino tails, or bunny legs.

[CrazyCatLady]

@joebuck20

Howabout on Ace of Cakes where they’re carving up cake all the time and then frosting them up? Do they just use a sturdier variety of cake?

If you notice, they don’t use carving and buttercream for smallish, intricate things with clear, sharp edges. They use modeling chocolate, or fondant, or some other “trick” to do that. Actually, modeling chocolate or a thick sheet of regular chocolate would probably be a good choice for doing a bas-relief cake. But that wouldn’t fall within the OP’s guidelines.

[flodnak]

Aaaaaand just by coincidence, today’s Cake Wrecks entry is fondant-free Sunday Sweets. For those of you unfamiliar with the blog, six days a week the author features bad professionally-decorated cakes, from the unintentionally humorous to the truly amateurish grocery-store-bakery cakes. But on Sundays she chooses to highlight well-done cakes, the so-called Sunday Sweets.

Beautiful things can be made with all edible (and tasty) ingredients.