-How I Made a Giant Easter Egg out of CAKE! _ Georgia's Cakes

Hi, welcome back to my channel. With Easter fast approaching, I wanted to share how I made this mega Easter egg cake. A giant egg made purely from cake, complete with a smooth buttercream coating, pipe details, macarons, meringue kisses, edible flowers and a chocolate nest. This was so fun to make and a great alternative to a regular chocolate Easter egg too. To start, I had two ready crumb coated cakes, one 7 inch and one 6 inch cake, both made with 4 layers of cake so they were nice and tall. Before I started carving the cake, I wanted to stack the 6 inch on top of the 7 inch. Now unlike a normal stacked cake, I didn't add dowels or straws or an extra cake card in between. The cakes that I was using were extremely cold and I was going to cut quite a lot from them anyway so the cake underneath wasn't going to be holding the weight of a full cake on top. I actually decided to flip the 6 inch as I place it on top of the cake. To be honest, there wasn't a real reason why I did this but I wanted the top of the cake to be as flat as possible before I started carving onto it and the top of the cake was where it was touching the cake board, hence its flattest part. To have a reference of the egg shape, I actually got hold of an egg and had it next to me the whole time so I can carve the cake accordingly. Using a small sharp knife, I began carving the top of the cake. The 6 inch cake did slide around a bit as the layer of buttercream in between the cakes wasn't totally set but because the cake in general is very cold, the carving process wasn't too difficult. I started building a cone like shape at the top of the cake but always turning the cake around on the turntable as I cut to ensure the shape stays as symmetrical and round as possible. Then I started to carve the bottom of the cake inwards to start building more of an egg shape. Then I tackled the sharper corners where the two tiers met. As I was carving, I knew a lot of the shape would be corrected with the buttercream on both the crumb coat layer and the outer layer but as I always say, the better shape of the cake underneath, the easier the next steps will be. After getting an overall egg-ish looking shape, I decided to clean the excess cake that had fallen on the table and finish up building the cake with the buttercream whilst applying the crumb coat. After all, working cleanly is key. I used my Swiss meringue buttercream to coat the whole cake in a thin layer of buttercream covering all the areas of exposed cake which will ensure that the crumbs are locked inside before I apply the outside coating of buttercream. I'm using a small step palette knife to apply this layer at first and then will smooth it out afterwards. But what I'm doing here is filling in that big gap between the 7 and 6 inch cake. If I would have carved this, the egg would have been a bit too narrow so I'd rather pack this out with buttercream to get a more bulbous egg shape. Once I applied a thin layer to the whole cake, it was time to smooth it. Obviously, being a rounded shape, a side scraper wouldn't do the job here so in fact I used a small piece of acetate to smooth out the buttercream. I used a combination of scraping from the bottom upwards and then going around the cake sidewards to build up the shape of the cake. Once the buttercream was smoothed, I looked at the cake and decided it wasn't quite egg shaped enough. Turns out, creating an egg shape is much harder than I anticipated. I decided to cut into the bottom even more and reshape the top of the cake too and after I did that, I was much happier. Still not perfect, but I did have the second buttercream coating to work with too. I finished off the crumb coat and then carefully moved it to the freezer to set in preparation for the second coating of buttercream. When thinking of what colour to choose for my egg, the colour Duck Egg Blue came to mind for obvious reasons, but it is also one of my favourite shades of blue too. I added a combination of blue and green gel food colouring to my buttercream and mixed it in by hand. When you beat buttercream with a spatula, it knocks out the air bubbles and gets really smooth which helps minimise air bubbles when applying to the cake after. Once I was happy with the colour and after resting my arm from mixing, I brought my cake back from the freezer and started to apply the second coat of buttercream. Firstly, with my palette knife again, about half a centimetre thick, I coated the whole cake and then smoothed it out using the piece of acetate. Again, changing between smoothing from the bottom of the cake upwards and rotating the cake on the turntable going around the cake multiple times. When I did this, it reminded me of doing pottery at a wheel. Because the egg shape is round, it's easier to feel if it's not symmetrical. I had to touch up areas which I felt needed bulking out a bit to even out the shape, but again, this egg shape was really tricky to achieve. I ended up smoothing out this cake for about 25 minutes until I was happy with not just the smoothness of the buttercream, but the shape as well. I'm sure there was an easier way of creating a perfect egg shape, but where's the fun in that? What I love about making carved cakes is that because the cake needs to be very cold, the buttercream sets quite quickly against the cake and almost starts creating different shades of colour. Sometimes it can be a bit annoying, but when you're trying to create something more realistic, it really adds to the effect. I still wasn't 100% happy with the shape at the bottom of the cake, but I knew I was going to add a chocolate nest around the bottom which would hide this a bit. Plus, it is a cake after all and needs a wide support at the bottom, so I'd rather leave it than risk the cake collapsing. A few more times around the cake to smooth the last bits out and then back in the freezer to set one more time before adding the final details of decoration. I wanted to create a speckled egg effect, but I thought splashing black on top of it would be a bit too harsh, so I opted for gold. For the gold paint, I used edible gold powder and mixed it in with a little bit of alcohol. This also works with lemon juice. I used a stiff paintbrush to flick the gold over the cake and absolutely loved the effect. It looked really magical too. For the chocolate nest, I was considering creating broken chocolate pieces around the bottom, but I remembered I actually had some leftover chocolate ganache in my fridge. So, I filled up a piping bag with it and squeezed it around the bottom of the cake. I rotated the cake whilst I piped this on to achieve evenly piped lines and eventually these built up and created a wonderful nest effect. The ganache set quickly which meant I can build the nest up quite a lot. This was also much easier than starting to temper chocolate. The more uneven lines there were, the more natural the nest looked too, so I was really happy with this effect. Plus, as expected, it hit the bottom of the egg and it made it look like the egg was really sitting in the nest just how I wanted it. Now it's time to decorate. And I didn't just want this to be any plain old egg in the nest, so I thought to give it the George's Cake touch. I started by dusting the nest with a touch of gold to enhance the shape of it, as well as complementing the gold splashes on the cake itself too. Next I went on with some pink buttercream for contrast and using a piping bag with a star piping tip, I piped some details coming down the side of the cake. This wasn't just going to be a decoration, this was also going to help stick the other decorations to the cake too. I had a selection of blue and pink meringue kisses which I placed on this buttercream as well as a couple of macarons too. And then finally, some edible flowers. Easter is a celebration of spring and so I thought the addition of flowers was a must. However when I started applying the flowers, I actually decided that this darker purple colour really didn't work with the rest of the tones on the cake. So I just opted to stick with the orange flowers instead. I think when it comes to cake decorating, it's all about really understanding that final look of the cake and knowing which colours and decorations work with each other, rather than just throwing everything at it. Once again, an egg shape was so much harder to achieve than I originally expected but I was really happy with this final outcome and love those additional decorations I added too. I hope you enjoyed watching this process, I certainly had lots of fun making it. If you do try it out this Easter, don't forget to tag me at georgiascakes on Instagram and if you haven't already then please subscribe to my channel so you never miss a video. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you very soon.