Cakie! - The Frosting

Friends, let me tell you about my latest fixation:

Princess Cake.

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This Swedish treat features delicately sweetened vanilla cake, filled with raspberry jam and fresh cream. It's moist, yet sturdy, and shaped to perfection with a layer of marzipan frosting.

It is amazing. I suggest you all find the nearest Swedish bakery and try it out.

But the reason I bring up this mouthwatering morsel is mainly because of the frosting. There are, it seems, alternatives to the standard buttercream or fondant choices. Let's discuss:

-Buttercream

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Made mostly of butter and sugar, this is the standard (and cheapest) cake frosting. Tasty, no frills, icing. It's easily piped around into flowers or basket weave patterns. It is, however, more difficult to create smooth, flawless looking surfaces. You also can't make fancy-sturdy models with it.

-Fondant

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A standard for smooth, tiered wedding cakes these days, commercial cake fondant is made of gelatin, glycerin, glucose and powdered sugar (sounds, delicious, doesn't it? :P). You can also make your own with marshmallows, if you prefer. It's more costly than buttercream, and tastes like..well, it doesn't taste like much. It's usually just peeled off and left uneaten. It cannot be used for piping, but can easily be molded into desired shapes and appliques, and has excellent structural strength.

-Royal Icing

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This is the hard, meringue-like substance on decorated sugar cookies and pre-made candy cake decorations. It's a bit brittle and inflexible as a cake cover, but would work for making sturdy piped details or appliques. It's made mostly from egg whites and sugar.

-Ganache

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Ganache is made of chocolate and cream, and tastes like a dream. However, it is super soft and prone to melting, so don't even think about using it for gravity-defying cake architecture, cause you won't get any support from this!

-Modeling Chocolate

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Perfect for creating rigid, complex structures, modeling chocolate can make for a super-sweet alternative. It's made of chocolate and a sugar syrup, but I'd still be a little wary about the melting factor.

-Marzipan

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Made of sugar and ground almond meal, marzipan makes for a great cake-cover when rolled out thinly. Let me emphasis thinly, as this frosting packs quite a flavor punch. It's best paired with simpler cakes like vanilla, since the almond flavor can overwhelm anything more complex. But boy, is it ever delicious! Structurally, it works similar to fondant, though it can become too brittle when dried out. One other note - marzipan apparently only comes in about 2 colors, green and ivory/almond color. Though I'm pretty sure you can dye the natural almond color to your preferred hue...

I'm definitely going to ask any potential bakers what our frosting options are. Sak is definitely pro-anything-chocolate, but I'm not sure if it would hold up in the Hawaii-heat. And I love the marzipan, but it might not go well with guava-coconut cake. Yet even if we end up back at fondant and buttercream, at least now I know there are other alternatives I need to "taste test"!

What are you covering your cake in?