Why cake decorating is hard work

I was asked to do a cake for a girl freinds son who was graduating university. He is also in the police force so I was asked to do a round cake with a graduation cap and scroll on it. Easy peasy I thought, yeah, mother nature had other ideas.

I normally bake my cakes and make my ganache 2 days before. So I did my normal ratio of ganache, 2 parts chocolate one part cream. Set it aside to harden slightly the night before. We were having hot and humid days and I didnt take this into account.

So I ganached the cake, and it seemed to take forever to set so I popped it into the fridge hoping to help it along. So once it seemed to set I started to roll out the fondant.

Once I put the fondant on I thought all was going well, BOY was I wrong. Within 5 minutes of covering ( which was the cleanest and smoothest cover I had done at that point! ) the ganache under the fondant started to melt. The cake was developing love handles!! I was stressed at this point thinking OMG I havent come across this before. I took the cake to our granny flat to put infront of the air con as it is very strong and can almost snap freeze your face when its on. But this time it didnt help. SO it was my first time I had to remove the fondant and start again GEEZE! BUT before I did recover, after consultation with my facebook cakie community, I mixed extra chocolate into the ganache which seemed to help.

I added an extra thin layer of ganache and thankfully this helped.

So moral of the story ( well there is many ) 1, take the weather into consideration and make your ganache to suit. 2, DONT PANIC! 3, We are our own worst critic, I was so UNHAPPY with the end cake but it has received positive feedback. 4 remember every cake no matter how simple the design seems to be, can be the most challenging of them all!!!

-- Kellie, Australia, http://www.teddydesigns.com.au, Facebook http://www.facebook.com/cakesbyteddydesigns