Basic Buttercream Cake Decorating

1. Intro to Buttercream Cake Decorating: Hi, I'm Cali and welcome to cake decorating. Today, we are going to be decorating a beautiful buttercream cake. I have prepared one here earlier. I'm going to show you my hints and tips to leveling these cape is the exact recipe that you have in your booklet. You've already been sent through. It's exactly the same as in there. Also be showing you live how to do make the butter cream. So you've got icing sugar and butter, small container for the water that will have later in terms of tools, we've got our meat, so here I'll stand mixer. We've got scrapers, so a smaller one and a larger one, depending which you prefer to work with and also the height of your cake at all. A cake you need a larger scraper. We've got a spatula, a nice, this is a bread knife from my kitchen set or you can get larger canines. I cranked spatulas is also called a spatula, but it's either a cranked or an offset spatula. We're working on a cake board. So this is a tin inch cake board which you can get from any cake store. Other things we've got here to fix, which I'll reveal why in a little bit. We have colors and flavors not necessary. But if you wanted to color and flavor, I'll go into more details about these, but this is a Joe color and we've got some oil flavorings, so we're gonna get prepared. We're going to start with our butter cream and we're gonna get cracking onto our cake decorating. 2. Thanks for watching!: If you've enjoyed the class, there is a Facebook group to join for more hints and tips. And I hope you enjoy eating your cake as well. Happy caking. 3. Buttercream decorating: Okay, So we've got here two cake layers. This is one recipe from your booklet baked into 26 inch teens to give us two layers. When we're talking about cakes, if we're stacking up several layers to make one kite that will be served three layers in a cake, in one tier. And then if you've got different heights, are really large one and the small one, that's called a two-tier cake, just for reference. So yes, this is one recipe baked into two different tins. What you will notice with my, so I'm not going to spend too long took map baking only give you a couple of simple hints and tips. First one, drop your oven temperature, but at least ten degrees when you cook something, sorry, bake something for the first time. That's because every oven is completely different and we don't actually tell when things are baked by the time it's there for a guide. There are other ways to tell when things are baked. So that is, if you've got your tin, you've prepped it in. So even if it's a non-stick t and you do need to spray it and put baking PayPal. So the cheek to that is grab your team could overpay the baking paper, trace around it with a pin, a pen, sorry, and then cut around it that will form the base of your tin. And then you grab another piece of baking paper and line that non-state spray and baking paper to line your teams. But the way we TO when things are biked is they shrink away from the sides just slightly on the tin. And when you press the top, it comes back, it springs back. What we end up with ease and nice flat cake like this when we bake low and slow. So we crank that temperature down, particularly the first time you bake a recipe. The other thing that we're going to do is if you're baking on two different shows, you're going to swap halfway through. So not only are you going to swap any levels in the oven, The also going to turn them around as well. So your oven is likely to have hotspots, no matter how Fen dangled it is, your oven will have hotspots. So by rotating the tins and swapping them from top to bottom, if you baking on different shelves, it'll give you a cake the best chance of cooking evenly and rising evenly. If you've ever had a cake that is domed a lot, what that tells me as your oven is way too hot and the ingredients have combined and activated too fast and then shot up rather than baking low and slow will give you these beautiful flat tops. That's hints and tips for baking so low and slow, rotate them. An extra low and slow. Okay, so we're gonna cut the tops off these, there's not much there to cut off, which is ideal. We don't want, or if you might want extra cake scraps to eight. But the idea is that we don't actually need to cut much off at all. It means the, all the ingredients are in the cake themselves and we're getting more out of that cake. But when we do go to cut it off, so let's get rid of our PayPal. What the aim of what we're doing here is to cut the top off. You might be wondering, well this level, why we actually bothering to cut the top off. This here is in secret ingredient, which I will tell you about. It's not in your recipe book, but I will tell you about it and it will just hang tight for that one. What we're doing here is we are finding the lowest level across all the tiers that we're working with. We're going to unwrap this guy as well. And across both these layers, we are finding I will keep that one for a second until you, I'm sick. We are finding the lowest level across both these layers. You might need to get down nice and low and have a look at the lowest level is going to be on this side here. I need to grab myself some toothpicks. So four will do for us. I will say If I mentioned today anything about perfectionism is not a dirty word in this kitchen. It's about working with your personality type. So I'm a rustic bakery. I do things fairly rustic if you tend to like things more perfectly. I'll give you some hints and tips to make that happen. So what we're doing is we're finding the lowest level on both those tiers. And we're going to put in a toothpick where that is, the lowest level is there. And what we're gonna do is we're going to measure. So if you're a rustic like me, what you use is that's roughly two fingers and a little bit above that gap there that we've got. Otherwise, grab your scraper that has a ruler on it. And it'll be able to measure exactly how high that point is. What we're going to do here is put in to fix. So north, south, east and west or the clock if you prefer to do it like that. Two fingers and a little bit of a gap. So go to the other side, fingers and a little bit of a gap. That's where we put the toothpick. I'll do it on the back and I can't see it but two fingers in little gap and then two fingers and a little gap. What we've done there. Is created a basis for our knife to guide around and create a level cutting surface off the top so we can cut that off nice. And even, as I said, if you, someone who tends to be more of a perfectionist, you may either want to stick more toothpicks in, so you have eight of them in total. That's a good number. Otherwise use a ruler or the ruler on, you could use a normal plastic ruler or the ruler on your scraper. Anybody able to get the same effect, so mark exactly where it is and that will get you nice and level. So this one is side, bring this into the center. And what we're gonna do here is the knife that we've got. Ideally, the knife is bigger than your cake. So if you're working with a larger cake, so a standard size t and that you might have at home is a 20 centimeter cake or an eight inch cake. What we want to do is make sure that our knife is big enough to go through the other side so we can see where we're working. Because what we're gonna be doing is scoring around the edge using these two pizzas are guides. So it's important that our knife does reach across them. And using that as a guide. What I mean by that is by going on top of the toothpick where that sits. We've crossed over to this one. We're scoring just their scoring over these ones that moment we're just creating a very lot score. And we're reaching with that toothpick is I haven't quite reached where he is there. We're using these tweets mixes, God. Then we can start to cut a little bit deeper and cut through to where those toothpicks are. We'll get rid of our scraps. And we've got they're not perfect. Again, I'm a rustic Baker. I'm completely fine with this. If you are use your ruler, the important thing is that you're holding your knife flat at all times. You're not bending it up or bending it down. So it may be that you'd be better off getting down nice and low to your cake and living out through. If it's not perfect, it really doesn't matter at this stage, the variation is going to be a chromosome, right? The variation is gonna be so slot that you won't notice it and we'll be able to compensate with buttercream to make it up. In a way I would do the same with this guy. Now, the lowest level that we were working on was two fingers and a little gap. So do the same here. Two fingers and a little gap. Fingers and a little gap. This cake in general is a little bit higher, so we will be chopping a little bit more off. Hopefully that makes sense. They're not exactly stripe. At this point is crumbs everywhere, it doesn't matter. We will clean them up. We're scoring across where those toothpicks are, twisting our cake. There's also a reason I'm not doing this on my turntable. And my cake board is that it will become a little bit oily if I leave that on there. This is a butter cake, so it's a heavy, heavy on the button. Now we're cutting through. We have got fairly level layers. So this is Slot differences in them. We won't see them and we actually put the cake together. That is cutting and leveling your cake. I will say there are some cake cutters that you can get the old arch type one with a string. I would just throw that into bins to be honest because they're not very useful. There are KV cutting something through very light like a sponge. But in what we're working with is butter cake. It's between, I'm sure you ate one before, but it's between a sponge and a mud cake. We want something that's fairly dense to be able to stack it. But not too dense that the white of the eye, not too dense that we need something heavier than butter cream to hold it up because the cake is so heavy. Mud cakes and normally stacked with ganache because ganache is a heavier substance and it will hold those layers up. We can stack a butter cake with butter cream because that white ratio is okay. We've got our two layers. I'm going to show you the sacred. So you're probably wondering what this is here. This is sugar syrup. Sugar syrup. No, there's no recipe for that in the booklet, but sugar syrup is something that will help to preserve your cake and keep it longer. So you might be thinking why adding more sugar to a cake is already a decent amount of sugar in the cake. Yes, that's completely true. But she'll get in this instance is acting as a preservative. So it will prolong the life of our cake. And sorry if you hate the word, but it will make it moist. And that will mean that your cake would last longer. So what we are doing is, I prepared this the day before because it does need to be cool. So the ratio is a good idea, would be half a cup of sugar, normal white sugar. Half a cup of water, put that in a small source pan on the stove and bring that to just before it starts to bubble and boil over. Set that aside and let it cool. Once it's cool, you can pop it in something like this, a squeezy bottle. Alternatively, you can just use it from a container and use a pastry brush. The idea of this is the way adding a small amount. So roughly a tablespoon per layout, each depending on the size of your layer as well. We're not drowning our cake. We're just putting a bit of sugar syrup to act as that preservative. I'll show you what I mean. And I would typically do this. So if you've had your cake wrapped up, it would typically do this over the Glad Wrap. Because what we don't want to do is accidentally drown our cake and see the sugar seer running out at the bottom of the cape. That will make it difficult when we transport it to the board. Because you will say some waiting out the edges so we don't want to add too much that that happens. We're really just adding a small bit. You can see here there's not a lot in here. This is plenty for what we need today. We're going to drizzle it on. You can either do it across or probably what's better is to do a circle. So I'll do this one in a circle. It's going around. And that is plenty for what we're working with. We haven't actually used that much at all. Roughly a tablespoon per per cake. And what that does, it will give you an extra day or two with eating your cake. Beautiful mouthfeel as well. And it doesn't make it taste much sweeter because you really haven't added a whole lot in. Our cakes are now ready to stack. What we're gonna do is we're gonna make our buttercream clean up the bench. We've got our cake is ready to go. We'll make our butter cream, and then we'll start stacking things to get out. So clean this up and come back in a second. All right, Well, we have here our icing, sugar and butter and our warm water. Quite hot actually. So boiling is fun. You would say this is our thinks sugar mixture and this is salted butter. The reason for the icing sugar mixture is that it's got started through it and makes it a little bit easier. We don't need to sift it. You can also check your sift it in the bin. We have salted butter. Salted butter is not going to use the fact that salt in there is not going to hide the amount of sugar that we're using. But what it will do is help to disguise that. So it's Thyestes a little bit more balanced and doesn't Tice overly sweet. The important thing here is that we have 500 grams of butter and one kilo of icing sugar. So the ratio is one to two. So one part butter double the amount of icing sugar. That's the ratio. You also notice that these are home brand from bullies. I think I haven't noticed a huge difference in quality compared to the home brands and the brand names. That's a complete that's completely up to you. That is your choice, what you prefer to use. But yeah, just my note, I haven't noticed a difference in quality at all, so I do use these ones. I'm a business, so I try keep costs down where I can. That's the reason for that. I will buy like the icing sugar if it's on special with the brand name. Otherwise, I'll stick to this one. In terms of brand names. I haven't particularly noticed the difference between COLS and will ease either. Either are, either, either got here our butter, working with butter at room temperature. What does room temperature mean? It means if you've got a packet like this, that it is a bit squishy. You shouldn't be able to stick your finger right through it, but it should just have a bit of squish. If you're using it straight from the fridge. One, you're going to have lumpy butter cream TO YOU might hurt you pour mixer because it's gonna be really hard for that to mix it through. You're going to have lumps. We want to cut this guy up. Again. We didn't want to stick a whole brick in there and my comics, so work super hard. Use our cutoff for this one. We're gonna cut it into smaller amount, so just roughly chopping it up. Now this is a lethal bit code, but that's okay. And I can feel that it's a little bit cold because these sticking a bit as I'm cutting it, the outside might be squishy, but the core is still a little bit cold. So all we're doing is chopping it up. I did mention that I'm rustic. This isn't supinate. It really doesn't matter. It's just to help your negative a little bit. Heat goes in. But it's gonna go in first for this one, we want to make sure that our budget is at the right temperature. And the best way we can do that is to put the battering first. So if we need to beat it just that little bit more, we can do. Once you've got the icing sugar in there, it makes it a little bit harder. This is very uneven shopping, but that's all right. Goes in. The recipe in the booklet, calls for list broader than this, but you're always better off having more working with a ratio of one to two or one packet. One packet is much easier because if you've got leftover, you can just store that for next time. I'll talk through storage towards the end in our last chapter. We've got chopped up. Let's go on into our bowl that can go on to the mixer. As I said, it is a little bit cold, so I'll pull this mixer into the center so you can see it a little bit better as we work on our butter occurring. Him, pull him in. Now. But occurring, anything we're mixing, to be honest, is going to be on low quite a lot of the time. I'm gonna stick him on low. Gonna get a little noisy in here because his body is a little bit cold. I am gonna wizard just a little bit higher, so it will go on a higher speed. But generally we always mixing on the lowest speed available. But for now I'll stick on low, you can hear that and then I'll stick it on higher and you hear that too. All right. That's on large. Just going to stick them on high for about ten seconds, max. Get wild in hand. Just so you can hear me over that rattling. That's about as high as my buttercream will ever go for about as long as it will ever go. That's allowed because I'm gonna do that again just to double that. The idea is that butter is always beaten on low. We are not, sorry, it's mixed on low. We're not beating it and we're not creaming it. We are putting it on low. So even when it went too high, that was still any like half the max capacity of this machine. If I went any higher, it would probably rattle off the whole bench. So we're not going to do that. I'll stick it on back to where it was for about another ten seconds. The other part of that is everything that is stuck to the Betas. So there is a bit of butter stuff to the beta. Let me show you. If we visit up, the faster it goes, it's going to flip that off as well. And it means I don't need to scrape it down because I'm slightly lazy. So let's do that again. That has helped to make sure our butter is a little bit warmer. Every time that paddle touches the button, it is adding hate into there. So that's why we don't whip our butter on high, because if we did that continuously for 1015 minutes, we'd have buttercream suit and not buttercream. We always want to make some low apart from me for a couple of seconds, you wheezing the mixer to get the butter off. So I'm actually going to strike, strike came off the Beta. Now, I'll put that on, back on low again. And makes him a little bit further before we start adding our icing sugar. Sugar we want to add in stages. So if we're doing a mix of one bag or one packet of data to one bag of icing sugar. What we want to be doing is roughly putting in these eating and about five increments into spacing that with our water. So I'll pour about a fifth of this in roughly 200 grams. The reason we don't do it all at once. The reason why I don't do it all at once as many methods of doing this, I don't want to assume sugar explosion in my kitchen. And I find it easier to work in smaller increments and check it often. The whole recipe is going to take about five minutes max to make anyway, so it's not along recipe. And putting in that water will help to dampen the icing sugar so there's no explosions. Now, how much water do you put in? It's roughly for the one packet of butter. It's roughly a tablespoon of water per 200 grams of icing sugar, roughly. I say that because the thickness of your buttercream is going to depend on a couple of things. The main one being temperature. So if it is warm outside and you know, you need a stiffer buttercream, if you know, your cake is gonna be sitting outside in a park, you don't want to slightly stiff or buttercream, sorry, sitting outside in a park in summer. If it is winter and buttercream can maybe a little bit stiffer to work with. You might want a little bit more water in there to make that buttercream easier to work with so that it's not as stiff on you. The other reason that I'm using I've got greasy fingers which are quite annoyed me. The other reason that I am using water and not milk is as a commercial kitchen, I'm unable to use fresh dairy product. You're probably wondering, hang on, but I'm using butter. How is that not a fresh dairy product? That is technically show stable from the sugar that makes it stable, but the fresh milk hasn't been process as much as butter has. And so therefore, home kitchens are not allowed to use fresh milk. So water is a great alternative. If you think about again, if you've got a cake sitting outside in a park in summer, you don't particularly want fresh milk in that cake. Water is a great alternatives. That is why I use water. So we've got about a fifth of our icing sugar in there, roughly one tablespoon of water and we'll be able to adjust that. One is we're mixing it will see it. And also depending on how thick or runny issue we want our mixture to come out. So we'll put that on low again and let's get going. I will show you this as we go along so you can see it come together. This is not very exciting parts. Once it comes together, that is a little bit exciting. Start with add roughly another fifth in there. Another tablespoon of water. Also. I will show you this when we get about halfway through to save a difference in how it's coming together. But you can also hear how it's coming together as well. How it's combining. The other reason I stop at every time isn't so we're not having icing sugar going absolutely everywhere. Put water in. Show you now how that's coming together. We have got a big chunk of butter stuck on our Beta, which is okay, we're pushing back in and before I add anything extra or mixed that again, so it combines. This is how it's looking at the moment starting to come together as butter occurring. So at this point I'll give it a lot scrape around the edges. It's our butter cream. Back on our mixer. Just scraped him down here on the Beta as well. We've got most of it in there. And always it up again before putting anything else in. Just to make sure all that butter is combining through. But occurring more icing sugar. I mean, not, not the most exciting part at all. I'll show you this again in a second because there's a point where it suddenly comes together and it goes from looking like a yellow, a block of butter to coming together and starting to look like butter cream. And it's like, oh, dance coming together. In nearly there. We've got our last slot of icing sugar to go in. This is also the point where they can judge, do I need to put water in at this point? Do I need to put extra water in at this point? I think we're on track for the economy of thickness today. That's looking quite good. And put the last asking shouldn't big lot. There. I'm going to put just another tablespoon of water. Get a final without. Then I will show you what you've in the ball. Kind of your lowest to your next lowest depending on your mixer and what you're using. You probably tell by the rat Odysseus as high as I will be going on this bench. But also how high be going on in a wall kitchen bench as well. Maybe stuffing. He's getting older, he's come together nicely. Give me two seconds and I will show you what he looks like. And our butter cream should be doing this. He is light and fluffy. This could go a little longer. So put him back on. But he is lot and fluffy. And he's able to hold like this. That is ideal but occurring. It is not moving too far at all. That is perfect. So I'm going to scrape this bowl again, put him back on, actually. Give them a scrape. Ulcers, show you what he looks like at the moment. That's our butter cream. And butter cream. Keep the older goods scraped down. Water out the way. The reason it was scraping it down is to make sure it caught any unmixed bladder that is in bottom. These faders really good that it goes to the bottom of the bowl and I will catch if your mix it does not, then just make sure you are stopping. You can stop it as often as you need to, to make sure that everything is in there. Again, this is what we're aiming for. Nice solid butter cream. That he's not gonna move too far. If you think you're stacking your cake in layers, you want a fairly solid butter cream so that your cake is not going anywhere either. Your buttercream is too sloppy, generally comes from the butter being too warm. You're not gonna be able to stack a cake because it's gonna be too sloppy and run out everywhere. Get the rest of this off here. Give it a good mix. I'm going to stick this back on the beta for just another minute or so. You can say that whole recipe took about 34 minutes to come together. Go to rat alone, sped up. I'm going to stop at there before I get motion sickness, but we've got a nice light butter cream. So the question I get asked a lot is how do I get really brought what buttercream? I have to remind you what color that butter wars when we started really deep yellow. This is now what we've achieved. If you want a wider butter Chrome, there's a couple of things you can do. One, you can bet it longer, the longer you beat it, the water will get. However, that is temperature dependent. If you are baking in the middle of summer and your house is not cool, or alternatively, you are baking in the middle of winter, but you run a fireplace or heating if you treat that as if you're baking in summer conditions. So when I talk about temperature, you're always thinking about the temperature of your house and the temperature outside as well, or influence things. So the longer you beat at the whiter you will get, but you can't always do that. So for summer, for example, you can't, you can't do that. In winter. You can bet it for longer. In summer. You can beta for a little bit longer. There's other things that we can get this color that we have here. This is obviously a turquoise. You can also get this white and you can add a white coloring into your buttercream. There's limitations on that because the amount of liquid that you add to your buttercream is going to make your buttercream softer. So we could stop out a little bit of water for the amount of Joe that we need. But if we were to try and make this whole thing brought watt more like the packet here. It's gonna take a lot of color to get that white. What I recommend is only making the outer shell of your cake. So we're gonna be doing a chrome layer, which will be stacking the cakes and coating it with a thin layer. And then we're doing a top coat. So I recommend only coloring the bit that you need. For the top coat to be bright white, you're gonna be using list coloring. Because the more current use you can also get a mouthfeel which tastes quite discussing what you can feel, a filmy feel on your tongue, which isn't pleasant at all. If you use say, this color butter cream to stack and crumb coat, and then you're very top layer, which is what I would do for wedding cake to top layer is bright or white. I wouldn't try and color these whole tub of butter cream watts because you're gonna be using so much which you will feel. You can use a Joe's, but there's also something else called titanium dioxide powder. So what you do to get that as a powder and you add a little bit of water to make it a liquid. It's very similar to the JOS that is more concentrated than the jails and that will make it white as well. Again, I only recommend doing that for the top coating of your cake. No one's really looking inside the cake to see how bright white the butter cream is. I would save yourself the hassle of trying to do that. I bought a crime is still sitting here. It is absolutely perfect. So it's still sitting here. Note that he is quite a warm day here where we have filming. This is great that it is not moving whatsoever. Again, if you think about stacking your buttercream layers, you want it to be nice and sturdy so that your cake hold up the weight of the layer above it. But occurring about occurring is good to go. What we're gonna do is we're going to tidy up these bench a bit, got icing sugar. I said no explosions, but I've had a little explosion, but that here, they're going to tidy up the bench. We will come back with a turntable and we're going to start sticking our cake. Okay, so our buttercream has come together beautifully. What we're gonna do now is crumb coat our cake. We're gonna crumb coat it in the creamy white color. I will show you colors and flavors afterwards. But for this purpose, we're just gonna crumb coat in the watt. So we've got our sturdy turntable. We've got our cake board, which is also sitting on a bit of non slip mat, makes your life much easier. What we're going to use is some butter cream at to act as our glute. We're gonna pop that down. And we're going to add our first cake, gonna squish them down. Roughly centered him. You know that you have something going on the board decorations or a name or a clock or candles, something like that. You may deliberately want to off-center it to allow for that. But today I'm gonna put him smack bang in the centre, pressing down so that glow kind of adheres. What we're going to do. I'm just going to walk my hands actually because that feels revolting. And we're now gonna stack outliers. We're gonna scrape apps and buttercream more than you would think you would need. So we're aiming for here more than that. Two scoops. What we're aiming for here is for hours, but occurring hot in-between our layers to be roughly half a centimeter to three-quarters of a centimeter. It's all about the ratio of cake icing and we don't actually want too much icing. So you know what? I've seen the same thickness as the cake. It's gonna make it harder stack, it won't set very nicely and be more prone to blow out. So roughly half a centimeter is what you're aiming for. At this point, I'm going to swap over. So I've used my plastic spatula to scrape, that's much easier. It's got a bigger surface. Use my crank spatula. So the way that we're holding this one, I find it easiest is to put my pointer finger up like this. It gives me more control and the hand he's holding it more towards the base. This is, I think it's a 15 centimeter or 17.5 centimeter cranked spatula. What's it saying? No, it doesn't say you can get these smaller or larger. These intermediate size I find really good for working with particularly the size cake I feel like the shorter it is that you have more control over it. The larger ones are good for bigger cakes, but they actually end up being a little bit floppy towards the end, I find this a bit more solid. So you've got your pointer finger on your crank spatula. And what we're doing is we're working with our risks here to glide from side-to-side. What we're aiming to do is put our buttercream over the edge for these, for the purpose of this. So at buttercream, we want to be a nice flat surface, but we want it to go right to the edges so that it hangs over. So I'll show you what I mean. So we're gonna start gliding this app, moving this out, pushing it out and over the edges. So we really want to focus on getting it right out to the edge. Say have created a fairly flat surface there that he's gone over the edge of that buttercream. So it's hanging on. It's doing its thing because we've got quite a fairly stiff but occurring. It's not going to drop down on the sides. If it does for a crumb coat, that actually doesn't matter because we're going to use that to mask our cake. It created a fairly level surface. If you're ever unsure, actually get down to the same level as your cake eyeball. It is the easiest way to say whether you've accidentally held your spatula on an angle at all. We want to make sure that it is super flat. Sorry. Gone right over to the edge. We eyeballed it. It's fairly level. We're gonna stick our other layer on top. We're going to flip him over. And I'll tell you why. It's easier to work with the call at the bottom of the cake, the bomb of the cake, rather than the other way up. You've got less crumbs this way because this is how it's baked into the pen. The idea is less crumbs. The crummy beat has gone into the middle, so it's sandwiched in there and that will contain more of the crumbs again. So I'm feeling like this is a bit wonky. I can see that it is higher on one side. I'm simply going to press that down and that makes it level across. If you have an edge, just push it down and it's much easier to do it at this stage than lighter on beat, harder to control at once the crumb coat has set. We've got our sandwich, two layers here with lots of butter cream overhang. Absolutely perfect for what we want. I'll move this out of the way. Because what we're gonna be doing here is spreading all the buttercream around the cake to mask it. The idea of the crumb coat is that we are fully trapping in older crumbs. But the other thing is doing is creating a seal all around and over your cake, particularly brought down to the board to stop the air getting in, which means it will deteriorate. If we trapped all the air out, it can't get in and it can't deteriorate appetite. We've also used as sugar syrup as a preservative inside a cave, He's gonna stay lovely and moist. There's a couple of ways you can do this and a couple of ways it'll depend on how you feel comfortable. I'm sorry. I'm gonna be doing it so you can see what I'm doing. But think about it, whether it's more comfortable for you to be doing a different action closer to where you can see it on your side. What I going to be doing is going up and over my cake. So I've got that position here, the pointer finger on your cranked spatula. You're going to be going up and over the cake. And working on this edge over here. This is a position I would normally do for cake decorating anyway, regardless of if this side of it, regardless of if people are watching. But obviously this is the easiest way for you to see what I'm doing. What I'm doing is smearing all these buttercream around the cake. It doesn't need to be perfect at this stage, it will be messy and crummy with all the crumbs, that is perfectly fine. They're going to be trapped in that buttercream. Now the other way that you can do it if that doesn't feel very comfortable with the tools. The other way that you can do it with the buttercream that's hanging over is an up and down motion. Whether that's on the side like this, how I'm showing you, or whether that feels more comfortable doing it towards you up and down here. What other works basically to get your whole cake covered all the way around using that excess butter cream, we might need to grab some more in a second. Sorry. Then we can start scraping around the entire cake as well. If you have excess, put that back onto the cake. Again, it will look messy at this point, that's totally fine. They're really important bits that I'd love you to concentrate on making sure right down to the base of the cake. See here there's a small gap down the bottom. We want to close that off. We don't want air getting in. That's the bit I'm really love you to concentrate on. No gaps down the bottom at all. Then we're going to smear across the top. This is crumbled a little bit, which is fine. It makes it a little bit harder to work with because it is crumbling. If you're finding that's a problem with whatever recipe you are working with. You can chill him for a little bit, so chill your layers in the fridge for a little bit. It will make it one cooler, but it will trap the buttercream in. Sorry, I'll put butter cream, it will trap the crumbs in and you might find that easier if you are having a hard time. So again, we're concentrating on the bottom. I'm making sure it is all sealed off. So a couple of things. My cake has moved off center. I'm gonna move him back the way I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do it now before we go any further. The way I'm gonna do is just use two fingers to push it over to where it needs to be. As simple as that. Then go back over and make sure that you've still got that seal. You will need to go over it again to trap in the bottom from where we've moved it. If at this point you notice that your TAs are looking at bit off as well. There may be not slightly centered the Y2, correct that if that happens, is holding two fingers on one side, chipping it on the other and gently squish it back to where it should be. That's how we solve that one. We're not gonna spend too long on this. No one is going to. There we go. We've got some nice crumbling going on there. We'll use any extra butter cream to put him back in. Pat him back down. This buttercream we've got on is essentially holding all these coding all the crumbs in. Does this need to be perfect? No. We want it to be fairly centered and we want it to be fairly strike. He is actually a little bit wonky. Again, get down nice and low. Check on your cake. Easiest way to do it. If you do tend to like things perfect, you could use your scraper as well. And go around at certain points and make sure it is nice and even that it's more to your liking. You describe most of the excess off. What all we're doing here is creating that layout. You might have a little bit less, you might have a little bit more buttercream. I would suggest less is best, as long as you've got a theme covering over the entire, entire cake. Looks really