Cake sculpting is the learned art form of designing and sculpting cake based raw materials into a variety of aesthetically beautiful everyday objects. Cake sculpting although began as a hobby is now a fully fledged career option, for the prices of sculpted cakes keep climbing a never ending ladder. Skilled cake sculpture’s are capable of sculpting a cake to be an exact replica of the object that it is to resemble.
Cake sculpting does not necessarily use edible products as there is the use of inedible objects in order to obtain the resemblance to the final cake sculpture. Some of the objects used are Styrofoam, skewers, cardboard, straws etc. These exceptionally sculpted cakes emphasise on attention to detailing. Some of the cakes that are most commonly sculpted are baskets, beaches, sand castles, mountains, and speciality figurines like cars, exotic animals etc.
Next, create the modelling chocolate dough and kneading into it the varied colours required in the sculpture. Kneading should be done by adding ‘dots’ of the food colorant onto the dough and kneading gently in opposite directions for the even distribution of color. Cake sculpting requires a good sense of color combination to make the icings blend in with the overall effect. This is followed by the preparation of required amount of butter cream and simple syrup for fillings
The baked cakes are stacked onto the cake board in an order that enables the cake sculpting of the desired ground shape. The cake board is usually a cardboard base that is wrapped in foil. Rough cuts are performed followed by trimming the sculpture into the desired shape using a serrated knife. A layer of butter cream is now spread onto the shape to give it the required smoothness before the detailing. There are different types of icing that can be used to achieve different effects. Some of them are decorator white, fluffy boiled icing, stabilized whipped cream rolled fondant, quick pour fondant etc which all function for a specific purpose of decoration. Each icing has a unique consistency which later dries off to result in different effects. Fondant is now used to cover the sculpted base and the edges are trimmed to give it a neat appearance.
