Its true! I’m finally finished with this little tutorial that I promised to you all several weeks ago. Thankfully, unlike the actual making of this tutorial, this technique is quite fast and easy. Here is a short list of things you’ll need to cover a cake in rustic horizontal lines:

• Chilled, stacked, filled and crumb coated cake - I like it chilled so there is no chance of the cake moving around at all while I’m finishing it. I also use swiss meringue buttercream to frost all of my cakes.
• A turntable
• Batch of buttercream
• Offset spatula
• Tapered offset spatula

Place your prepared cake on the turntable.

Using your offset spatula, apply a layer of buttercream to the top and sides of the cake. I left the top of the cake completely flat instead of adding any sort of texture. If you choose to do that, make sure to spend the extra time to make the top of your cake smooth and even.

The entire cake should now be roughly butter creamed with at least 1/4 inch of buttercream.

Grab your tapered offset spatula. I like to start at the bottom, though there probably is no reason at all why you shouldn’t be able to do the same technique from the top. I hold the tapered off set spatula almost flat against the cake, you don’t want to be gouging the cake as you rotate the turntable just leaving a slight indentation around the sides of the cake.

Gently rotate the turntable while keeping the tip against the sides of the cake. When you seem to be accumulating some buttercream build up, scrape off the excess buttercream from your spatula back into your buttercream bowl and place the tapered spatula right back where you left off. As I rotate I slowly begin to move my spatula up to create the next line around the cake. Keep rotating and moving your tapered offset spatula up the sides of the cake till you reach the top. Once I reach the top of the cake, I come back and “fix” any areas that don’t quite match up to the other areas of the cake.

But thats it really! Just a whole lot of spinning while indenting.

Remember that it doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s the beauty of a rustic design. Embrace your occasional glob of buttercream, your line that goes askew when the phone rings and startles you, and the large bump over a chunk of strawberry in your buttercream! These “imperfections” give your cake character.

If you have multiple tiers to do, just stack them up after completing the buttercream and allowing the tiers to chill a bit in the fridge. Super simple, super quick and super rustic!

As always, if you all have questions or comments, I’d love to hear them and will try to get back to you right away.

What happens when your friend lives states away and is having a baby shower for her FIRST baby?! Why, ship her a baby shower cake, of course! And that’s just what happened. Back on Kodiak, I met Astrid who over the years became not only my best customer but also a dear friend. Our husbands got their orders (Coast Guard) the same spring. They were moving to Louisville, Kentucky and we were being transferred to New Orleans, Louisiana. But the move didn’t stop Astrid from ordering cakes. We have had 3 (counting this one) successful cake deliveries! Here are the basics to how we have managed to keep our cake friendship going with states separating us.

I always use very stable cake recipes for my cakes with quite extensive support work. So the cakes are very sturdy. What I would have done differently and plan to do next time, is to get a center dowel that actually goes through the base board. I think what would work best is if I used a center dowel of all-thread and secured it to the base with a nut. This would be heavier and thus the shipping would probably be a bit more costly, but I do think that the stability would be worth it.

After I complete the cake, I wrap it in cling wrap and freeze the entire cake (preferably overnight but at least several hours).

This ensures that the cake is not going anywhere during transit and you won’t have to worry about the sides getting dinged up during the packaging. While it is freezing, I prep the packing box. Again, this is still a process that I am fine tuning but here’s what I did this time around. The cake itself was on a 10″ foam cake board and was approximately 10″ high. Here are the materials I needed:

• X-acto knife with new blade
• self-healing mat to cut on
• a sheet of styrofoam insulation (found it at Lowe’s)
• Measuring tape
• Foam (I used foam about 1 1/2″ thick)
• Packing tape
• A gazillion fragile stickers (though I’m fairly sure the UPS man ignored them)

I cut the sheet of insulation to fully line the inside of the box, this helped keep the cold in.

In total, I needed 6 pieces; so one for the bottom, 4 for the sides and 1 for the top. I lined the sides and the bottom.

I then cut the 1 1/2″ foam to fit the bottom of the box. This will give the cake some shock absorbency. I cut another square of foam and cut out a circle the size of the cake board.

I then cut that piece into 4 corners to secure the cake base into the center of the box. I removed the cake from the freezer and gave the cake a couple inches of bubble wrap around the first tier (the bubble wrap extended to the edge of the cake board). I then placed the cake into the prepared box and secured the corners using the foam I cut in the previous step.

I wrapped the top tier again with multiple layers of bubble wrap (this not only protects the cake it also helps keep it frozen during transit). I then began filling the empty spaces with chunks of foam again for some shock absorbency on the side of the box. Any empty spaces around the foam was filled with more packing material (bubble wrap).

I covered the top of the cake with ample bubble wrap and cut a larger square of foam to cover.

Make sure any gaps are filled in with bubble wrap. After the cake was completely secured, I placed the top square of insulation on top of the packing material.

I then used heavy duty packing tape to secure it. I went crazy trying to warn the driver of my delicate cargo by drawing random messages on the sides and covering it in “This Way Up” arrows and Fragile stickers.

I had called UPS earlier in the day to find out when the last truck pick up was for the day and dropped it to UPS about 15 minutes prior to that pickup. I used the Overnight Delivery with the Early A.M. option and I will say that it cost a pretty penny. The package was 23 pounds when finished and cost about $175 for shipping.

It arrived early the next morning having spent approximately 15 hours in transit. I gave Astrid directions to remove it from the packaging and let it come down to room temp on the countertop. As you can see, it made it to her baby shower just fine!

I’ll probably keep trying to fine tune this process though, keep in mind your customer has to be prepared to pay a small bundle for the shipping. Had there been a topper of some sort, I would have sent this in a separate package with directions for placement and how to secure it. Hope this helps all of you who have been trying this method of delivery!