On the 29th of November I attended a Vintage Icing course at the Cake College, to learn the more about how to master the vintage icing technique. It was a one-day course and was the first class on Vintage Icing that they had ever held. The course was designed to help students on the technique of the icing style, and on how to make a smooth, light, and well coloured buttercream that is good to use for piping and to fully ice and cover a cake.
I have been wanting to better understand and master the vintage icing style, as it is has become an increasingly popular icing style. I have previously tried to incorporate some of the designs when icing my cakes, and while they have turned out okay, I wasn’t fully happy with the result, so decided to go on this course to really get a feel for the technique.
There was no baking on this course, instead the Cake College provided us with cakes (mine was made gluten free!) This gave us more time to focus on making the buttercream, which I learnt is a process that takes a lot longer than I previously thought! After beating the butter for about 15 minutes and subsequently adding the other buttercream ingredients, we were taught about how to get the best result when using food colouring, such as using a small amount of lavender to get better results for lighter colours due to the yellowness of butter.
I chose to ice my cake pink, to no one’s surprise! We were using Colour Mill, which is a product I mostly use at home to colour my icing. I went for candy pink and baby pink. After adding colour, it was time to reduce the amount of air bubbles in the buttercream, which took a lot of arm and hand strength (and many breaks due to my lack of strength!) When that was done, we started covering the cake, using the lighter of the two pinks I covered my cake and took my time to ensure it was smooth and flat with nice clean edges.
After that was completed we had a demonstration on the different nozzles that are used to give the vintage style, such as 4B, 104, 18, 2. I found that I was really helpful to practice first on some greaseproof paper with stencils underneath to get more of a feel on how to position my hand and move while icing in the particular technique. After a few goes at this it was time to ice the cake!
This was a daunting process as I really wanted to get it right and was scared to mess up my cake. Luckily having previously used some of the nozzles on past cakes I was able to gain some confidence and begin. I found the ruffles the hardest to achieve, and still need to practice these as although I was able to achieve them on my cake, I would like to be more consistent with my shape and neater. Ultimately, I was very happy with the look of my cake, it looked in the style of vintage icing and the two pinks complimented each other nicely!
It was my second time attending a course at the Cake College, having previously attended their Beginners Master Class, and once again I had a great time. The staff were lovely, accommodating to my gluten free dietary requirement request, and happy to help with any issues we had during the day.
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