-Comic Cartoon Birthday Cake Tutorial! _ Georgia's Cakes.

Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. So this week is my birthday and so I thought to make myself a crazy birthday cake with your help. So if you follow me on Instagram you would know that I asked you for several designs so this is a compilation including this cartoon effect with the black outline. I had so much fun making this cake, it's a lot harder than it looks so this tutorial is more close up details of how I decorated this cake so I hope you find this tutorial helpful and of course enjoyable to watch. I love the effect of this cartoon cake as well, I thought it was so relevant for my birthday. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the tutorial and we'll see you very soon with more creations. So I'm starting off with a ready coated three tier cake so this is 8, 6 and 4 inches. For this cake I made four different pastel colours, pink, yellow, turquoise and purple. For the first tier I'm going to go with a circle pattern. So each piping bag has a number 10 round piping tip on it. So what I aim to do is pipe out circles nice and flat against the surface of the cake. Having a piping tip on there really helps get that circular shape. Now the most difficult thing was trying to get the circles as flat as possible so I mimicked the same action that I would do when I pipe macarons. I stay nice and close to the surface of the side of the cake and if I want a larger circle I start to move my hand. Now it did take some practice to get used to because what I really wanted to avoid is getting some peaks and for the circles to stick out too much. I want to keep them nice and flat however if there were a few peaks I wasn't worried because I knew I'd be going over and flattening them out after. So I piped on various sizes of circles, changing between all of the colours and filling in the gaps as I go. Once I was happy with the coverage of the circles it was time to flatten them out. Now something that I didn't mention at the beginning was that this cake was extremely cold. It had been in the freezer and then I transferred it to the fridge plus my air conditioning was on really strong. So what was happening was that as soon as I piped on the buttercream it was already setting to the cake which made flattening out the buttercream a lot easier. I'm actually using an angled palette knife here. You can use a regular one to do this but the benefit of having an angled palette knife is that the end of the knife is really narrow so you can get into smaller places, especially when I'm going in between the two tiers. So using the edge of the blade I was carefully flattening out the buttercream. So this is very similar as to what we do with a side scraper on the side of a cake with the buttercream. I'm smoothing it out, eradicating any air bubbles that are there. I can imagine this being a lot harder if the buttercream was still soft so it really helped that the buttercream was setting to the cake and staying nice and cold. Now don't get me wrong, this was difficult and I think I had to decide when to stop on certain circles, some of them just weren't playing. But I had hoped that it was okay enough, what I had done, and the final effect would still look really good. Now for the middle tier. Firstly, I want to cover in between the 6 inch and the 4 inch because there was some cake showing through. So I got my pink buttercream and piped on a nice thin layer in between. I then used this buttercream and piped on very cartoon like drips. This was the first time that I was piping on drips like this rather than just using my regular chocolate ganache. I really wanted this cartoon animated feel so I made the drips really exaggerated with nice curvaceous shapes. With the larger drips I used the piping bag to fill in the gaps and again kept it as flat and even as possible. I then took my angled palette knife once again and evened out the top of the 6 inch cake. Similar to how I would usually on a cake but obviously I had the 4 inch there. But again, because the cake was so cold, the buttercream was setting quite quickly and it made the smoothing out process really easy. Well, at least easier than I was expecting. So once the top was nice and flat, I started using the palette knife and smoothing over the buttercream drip. I started with a motion going from the bottom upwards to make sure that the buttercream was even before I went into more details. So I had to change the angle of the palette knife quite a few times in order to smooth out the buttercream as much as possible. The corners were probably the most difficult. I had to go around the cake quite a few times and clean off the corners and then flatten out the top again and continued this until I was satisfied with this layer. So now for the top tier. I wanted to pipe on cartoon-like sprinkles. So again, this is where having the piping tip was really helpful. I piped on multiple strands all over this tier, all in different directions and I tried to keep the thickness of each strand as similar to the thickness of the piping tip as much as possible to maintain the consistent shapes and thicknesses. Once it was full of these strands, I then flattened it out like I had done the previous tiers. Only by this stage, the cake was definitely more soft than when I had started and the buttercream was not as set as it was for the circles. So this did require a little bit more work and a little bit more patience. What I probably should have done is put the whole cake back in the fridge or freezer to firm up the buttercream, but I decided to keep things more difficult for myself. Once all the strands were flattened out, it was time to apply some nice big squiggles on the top of the cake. So what I did was place the remaining yellow and pink buttercream into two fresh piping bags, both with a 1M tip because I really wanted the most cartoon-like swirls possible. Because it was only a four inch on top, I decided to pipe on six swirls. So I squeezed as much as possible to get a really full effect and went on with lovely big rosette spirals, firstly with the yellow and then in between with the pink buttercream. And even though it was so simple on top, I really loved the effect of these swirls on top of the whole cake. So whilst I loved what the cake looked like at this stage, it wasn't finished because I needed to prepare the cartoon line. So as you've probably noticed in my previous tutorials, I've never made black buttercream. Reason being, it's quite difficult and it requires a lot of colouring. However, because the black line was going to be such a small amount, I was happy to do it for this cake. When you're making black buttercream, it's much easier working on a dark buttercream already. So I put all the remaining buttercream in a bowl and then incorporated some cocoa powder and mixed it through. So this is kind of like a cheat chocolate buttercream. This gave it this darker base to then colour. If you were to colour white buttercream, it would just turn grey and require a lot more colouring. Once the cocoa was mixed through, I added quite a few drops of gel food colouring and mixed that through. Now as you can see, it still stayed quite brown but it did get really dark. And if you've worked with buttercream before, you would know that the colour does develop over time, especially if you chill it. So once all the black gel food colouring was mixed in, I placed some cling film over the top and set it in the fridge overnight along with the cake to make both the cake and buttercream nice and firm until the next day. So the next day, I left the buttercream out for a couple of hours to get back to room temperature and you can already see how much darker it is. Giving it a mix really enhances the black colouring of it. Now you can see it's not jet black but it's pretty dark and I'm very happy with it. It will also create an amazing contrast against the pastel colours. I transferred it into a new piping bag with a very small round tip. I'm using a cup to help me fill up the piping bag and when I lift it up, I gently pat it onto the surface to allow any air bubbles to escape because I definitely don't want any air bubbles when I'm piping on these lines. And now I'm going to grab my cake from the fridge. So as soon as I started piping on around the shapes, I realised how difficult and lengthy this process was going to be. Firstly, it requires a very steady hand and at first I was definitely shaking. Of course it helped having the cake completely cold when I was doing it because the buttercream gave me some resistance when I piped onto it. Rather than going around each circle, I ended up drawing on top of the edge of the circle. It was a lot easier to do this and again, from afar, the effect was even better. Something I also quickly realised is that how important the pressure was to pipe on the line against the cake so it had something to stick to. There were a couple of scenarios that the buttercream kind of came off with my piping bag as I let go. So I had to apply a little bit more pressure than I thought but if I pressed too much pressure, the line would get affected. So that was probably the most challenging thing. Now you can see some of the lines are a little bit thicker than others but this was my first go and having known what I was in for, I'd probably choose a different design. Nevertheless, I really liked the effect. Now what I love about these cartoon cakes is that each tier is outlined and so I drew a simple black line around the whole base of the cake and the top of the tier, both the outer edge and where the tier met the one above. This really gives it this drawn-like look to it. When I was piping these lines, my hand was really shaking at this point and I realised that it's actually easier to pipe faster but obviously that's really scary so I was still playing around with the pressure and the speed but by the time I got to outlining the drips, I was that little bit more confident. The nice fluid shapes of the drips really helped me pipe this black buttercream on top and didn't have too many disasters whilst doing this. After I completed the outline of the drip, I then drew an outline around the top of the tier. I decided at this point to actually use a toothpick to tidy up certain areas that were really bothering me, places where the black lines had met or if I had gone round and made the black line thicker. Once again, because the cake was cold, this black buttercream did set to the cake so I was able to do this without smudging it too much. When I drew the line where the 6 inch meets the 4 inch, I realised how much better the line comes out when I was a little bit more confident and sped up the turntable. So by the time I was drawing around the sprinkle shapes at the top of the cake, the lines were really flowing. It also helped that the piping bag was a little bit less full anyway so I probably should have started with half the amount of black buttercream in than I had. As always, it's much easier to pipe the less you have in the piping bag. For the spirals on top, this is probably the most difficult to judge how many black lines I wanted to draw. I still wanted to outline the squiggles but if I were to outline every single piece of detail on each squiggle, it would have been too much black so I kind of did a combination. I went around a few of the piped edges and then a little bit on top. So I was so happy to have finally finished the black line of this cake. It probably took me over an hour just to do the line but of course this is my birthday cake and so a candle is definitely needed. This is a simple fondant candle that I topped the cake off with and now it looks like the ultimate birthday cake. From afar it really looks 2D and I absolutely loved how it came out. Thank you so much for everyone who sent in your designs to influence me into making this cake. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and like this video as well as share it with your friends and if you don't already then follow me at georgiascakes on Instagram where you can see all of my other cake creations too. Hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you very soon.