Handbag Heaven pt 1 Cake Decorating and Baking Tutorial

Learn how to make a sturdy cake stand that will hold a three-tier structure. You may choose to use plywood for the base as it’s a stronger wood. However, MDF also worked well for Paul. 

Here Paul cuts his cakes to shape in preparation for being ganached, leaving him lots of spare cake which can always be used for another project.

As no one will be eating this cake, Paul doesn’t layer his in the video so to not waste ganache, but ideally, it would be better to cut it horizontally and layer it nice and thickly. Paul then cuts off the lips of ganache after bringing the cakes out of the fridge before adding more ganache to the side of the cake and then smoothing it down with a wet metal side scraper.

Paul now smooths the cakes off with a wet pastry brush before covering them in 3mm thick sugarpaste, the sugarpaste is cut to size and then rolled over the top before covering the front and back in separate panels.

In this instance, Paul’s use of a high-quality sugarpaste on the design has actually made life more difficult for him. You can always do as Paul does and add the design before applying the panels but just be careful not to lose detail.

Paul now gets out some lovely dusts which are noted in the ingredients section, he mixes them with alcohol to achieve a nice thin paint.

Here we see just how much you can achieve with just some sugarpaste and a stitchy tool. It’s always good idea to have a handbag or a picture of a handbag in front of you for reference sake whilst working on your design.

Here, we see Paul add the trimming to the handbag before making the all important handles for the bags.

In this lesson Paul shows us how to get a lovely quilted look using a set square and a PME modelling tool.