Layered Buttercream Cake Design
Learn how to create an elegant and unique cake design that involves layering buttercream onto cakes in different shades and textures.
Ingredients
- Cake Recipe of your choosing
- Classic Vanilla Buttercream (Or your favorite buttercream that contains butter so that it firms quickly when chilled.)
- Coloring gels: We used Americolor Terra Cotta + Wilton Rose.
- Bench scraper and cake comb (cake comb is optional for layered buttercream, but needed or the design that we demonstrated. Our is from a Wilton set.)
- Piping tip 3 for adding small dots and bead border (optional)
- Gerbera Daisy (optional)
Instructions
- Frost your cake in vanilla buttercream as usual. We crumb coated our cake, chilled to firm the icing for 10-15 minutes in the freezer. Then, we added additional frosting and combed. Keep in mind that only the top half of this frosting will show.
- After combing the tier, I chilled once again in the freezer for about 15 minutes to firm up before applying a thick layer of lighter pink buttercream around the mid section of the cake. Smooth with a bench scraper.
- Once again, I chilled the tier in the freezer for about 15 minutes or so to firm up the first two layers of buttercream before adding the final darker shade of buttercream around the bottom of the tier.Apply it thick enough that you can easily smooth it with a bench scraper without interfering with the other layers of buttercream.
- We topped the cake with a gerbera daisy (resting on a small piece of wax paper which acts as a barrier).*We did not add a water source/water pick to the flower as it will look good on the cake several hours. (In our test, we refrigerated the cake overnight and it still looked good the next morning). Of course you can use a floral water pick/tube if you would like!
Video
Notes
Your layered buttercream cake can incorporated as many layer as you'd like.
Some decorators have done mountain scenes with a similar method. There are so many great options!
The most important rule is just to chill your cake until buttercream is firm before moving on to the next layer. This is easiest to do with frostings that contain butter (rather than shortening.)