Buttercream??

[bananasarebeautiful]

Hi, I've never decorated a cake in proper fancy type icing before but my daughter wants a character cake for her birthday. I have made a chocolate cake and bought some 'sugar dough' icing from Tesco-that you roll out etc.
What I didn't realise was that you needed a sticky layer on the cake for the sugar dough to stick to. What I need to know is

1. Is homemade buttercream suitable?
2. If so does anyone have a foolproof recipe?
3. Do you stick the sugar dough stuff on straight away or do you have to wait for the buttercream to set?

Any help appreciated!

Homemade buttercream is the best

I use 250g of butter with 625g of sieved icing sugar, a tablespoon of vanilla essence and a few drops of boiled water if it's too hard.

Once you've made your buttercream spread it across the cake, a tip is to fridge or freeze the cake for a few hours as it means less crumbs. A angled palette knife is the best tool for this. If I'm using ready to roll icing I'll cover it straight away.

Have a look on YouTube there's some good how to videos.

Thanks. Should I buttercream while still frozen then put the top layer on once defrosted?

Defrost your cake first, buttercream it and leave in the fridge for upto 24hrs to set and then cover

OK, will do!

When I am decorating cakes I just usadd a little bit of cooled boiled water to jam and use a brush to cover the cake before I put the sugar paste on. That's what we were recommended to do on a cake decorating course and it works a treat. Just an alternative if you are ever short of time to do the freezing method! Good luck xxx

Thanks for the other ideas-was briefly considering jam for a second then remembered my daughter won't eat jam! I don't think I'm up to concocting anything just yet but maybe I'll get some confidence if the cake survives me messing with it!

Top recommendation is to brush the cake with warmed apricot jam (sieve it to remove the lumps). I do it and it turns into the best food glue ever and doesn't alter the taste!

Good tip, will file that away for future reference!

You can only do this on a fruit cake, the idea of buttercream is to provide a smooth crusty layer otherwide it will be bumpy. I personally rather chocolate granche as I find buttercream very sweet. You can use a merguine powder to make it more crusty without adding more sugar which can make it oversweet. A buttercream should be 1:3 (1 butter, 3 sugar) otherwise it will be too soft. Add vanilla extract for flavour. First covering is the crumb coat then pop in freezer once set do two more layers - until it is crusty- I would use YouTube for best instruction on this.

You mean "sugarpaste" I would recommend 'Regal Icing' from a craft shop over the supermaket stuff. Once suagrpaste set and nicely crusty you roll our the sugarpaste but not too think and place on cake. You could use smoothers for this but not worth the expence if not using again. Where there are tears or holes cover with your designs etc. You leave the cake to dry out.

Thanks Bacon, this cake business is like a different language isn't it? In the end I decided to go with the jam as I wasn't sure I could guarantee suitable buttercream on a first attempt! So, the jam as a glue worked well. Then I rolled out the supermarket stuff and attempted to throw it into place (!) and it actually went on quite well-except I didn't quite have enough so attempted to mash some bits together at the end-those bits looked rough! Overall though it looked better than I could have expected. Better than it tasted strangely enough. I don't know if it was due to the cake recipe or the lack of buttercream but it just didn't taste sweet enough to me. And when we went to have a second taste the next day the icing seemed to have all melted into the cake!