Tiffany Pearls Cake

I've been meaning to make this cake for ages but it's a complex one so I needed a really good reason to bake it. This week was my dear Mum's birthday so I thought it would be the perfect occasion.

The cake is based on this Peggy Porschen design from her Cake Chic book. Peggy's version is a Wedgewood blue but I've done it, more properly in my opinion, in Tiffany green by mixing some Holly Green and a touch of Navy food colouring into sugarpaste.

I wanted an impressive cake with a 7" and 5" tier but I couldn't find any 5" tins on my local high street. Any bigger would have been far too much cake for our small family party so I had to settle for 6" and 4" tiers.

A two-tier cake really needs support to stop the top-tier sinking into the bottom one. You can buy special supports for this but I already had some cake-pop sticks which I just cut down to the right height. The sticks are meant to sit about one millimetre above the top of the icing. The board for the top-tier should sit on the supports and not the cake below so as not to squash the cake and make sure the structure is stable.






I'm massively out of the habit of decorating with royal icing so I'm quite pleased with how well this has come out. I did a practice version completely free hand and learned that I just don't have the skills to do that! On the real cake, as recommended by Peggy, I scratched a straight line into the top tier and used that as a guide line. For the bottom tier I hand drew some swathes onto a piece of paper that I then traced onto the cake and used that as a guide line. After piping on the pearls I left them to dry and then painted then with edible lustre to give them the pretty pearlised sheen.