Wedding cake question.. help!

[cleonardi]

My sister is getting married this August and she wants me to make her wedding cake. I just recently graduated from culinary school , so I know all of the basics but I've never actually completely made and put together a wedding cake myself. She wants it to be a 3 layer, sponge cake filled with Italian custard and raspberry preserves. She doesn't want fondant, so I suggested using ganache instead. I just wanted to know how do I go about assembling the cake without the custard and preserves spilling out and make the ganache look smooth? I also wanted to do a white chocolate ganache with raspberry extract... would that work or would it just evaporate into the sponge cake? Help me pleaseeee!

[ChefRAZ]

here's the scoop , first off as you probably know.white chocolate isn't really chocolate , It's cocoa butter.so your ganache will tend to be see thru.but that's not a problem. Coat your cake with the buttercream it will stop the cake from showing the jam. Let the ganache cool some before you cover it make enough so you can cover all the layers in one pass only swipe across that cakes once. Let them drip untill set. I will post a picture of one my shop has done it was nicely done. EDIT although this cake is not covered entirely you can still tell if there wasn't a crumb coat you would probablly have things showing thru. the cake wasn't made by me, and it was done a few years ago, but I was the only one with a camera handy so here it is.

[izbnso]

You will need to pipe a dam of some kind of icing to prevent the preserves and (I’m assuming) a loose custard from oozing out. It doesn’t have to be powdered sugar icing, but it can be (you could make it with white chocolate to blend with the white chocolate ganache) or it could be a butter cream (French, Swiss, Italian what ever you like).

To achieve a smooth surface for the ganache to cover you probably would want to give the assembled cake a crumb coat to make it smooth and even.

Either way the ganache will most likely be fairly warm so make sure the crumb coated cake is chilled so you don’t melt the crumb coat and have a yucky mess.

Alternately, instead of ganache, a poured fondant would give you a smooth finish and I’m assuming the objection to rolled fondant is taste: some brands are alright, some can be downright yucky. Then there is rolled modeling chocolate: acts sort of like fondant (not exactly) and tastes like chocolate or white chocolate. These options would also require a crumb coat for smoothness.

Hope that helps.

[cleonardi]

Thanks for your help! I was wondering if I should do a crumb coating so thanks for answering that too!

[chrissi_e]

Funny I should come across this thread. I am in very much the same predicament, minus the cuilinary training.

I am also making a wedding cake for a friend (mine is filled with raspberry italian meringue buttercream though). I once tried to cover a cake with modelling chocolate but I found it tore much too easily. I also just tried to cover it using a white marzipan I made. But i had the same problem with the tearing. Its as if the pastes are too dry.

Also, I am not very good at covering a round cake with this type of material and I am getting too many seams. Does anyone know a good reference that could show me how to seamlessly cover my cake? Any advice would be much appreciated as always.