Cake Design: How Romana Gardani creates her cakes (part II)

2017-01-02 After telling us about how she came to love Cake Design, cake architect Romana Gardani takes us into the kitchen to explain how her creations are born.
Cakes take form in stages. First Romana makes the decorative elements to put on top of the cake and leaves them to air-dry. Then she makes a sugar paste, coloured with food colouring the colours she needs. Lastly, she makes the cake.
�I never use sponge cake – explains Romana – because it needs to be soaked. Sugar paste suffers from damp, so I use cakes such as Red Velvet cake which are quite dry, with their own consistency, preferably quite tall. The cake is always separated from the sugar paste that covers it with a butter cream�.
It takes about ten hours of work to make a creative cake of medium difficulty. �What makes a cake beautiful – and my cakes must look absolutely perfect! – is attention to detail. People looking at the cake should not be able to see everything that it there right away, but should gradually discover the little details... Once I made a “Gnomes� wedding cake” for a friend�s wedding. There were lots of gnomes, every single one of which was different, and lots of other details such as a greasy pole, a strawberry fairy, bees, butterflies... It took me 60 hours to make that cake, three hours just to assemble it�.
I have made lots of unusual cakes. �For example, I was once asked to make a cake for a divorce party, with a broken ball and chain, and another time I was asked to make a birthday cake featuring a pile of skulls and the words “memento mori”�.
Romana doesn�t use the classic cake designer�s utensils. �When I first started there were no specific utensils, I just used my hands… Then Cake Design became more common and all these tools came out, but I hardly ever use them. My hands are normally enough, along with some toothpicks, a sharp-tipped knife and little rolling pin�.
At first she used her imagination a lot: �By looking at things with a creative eye and using lateral thinking, I made use of objects intended for another purpose. Once I was waiting in line at the supermarket when I saw some hair slides with little animals in relief on them and I came up with the idea of using them as stamps for printing in the sugar paste… I still use a parsley cutter to cut the sugar paste into strips, and a little plastic toy trowel to smooth the surfaces…�.
She�s not worried about the ephemeral nature of Cake Design, disappearing in a few bites. �It�s enough for me to take a photograph of my creations. The important thing is the creative process and ability to amaze people�. But she doesn�t need to amaze herself. �I�m certainly not going to make myself a cake for my own birthday…�.

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