Faultline Cake

Every time I think I'm done trying out cake decorating techniques, a new one becomes trendy.  Well, Bruin Smurf's birthday was coming up and she's moving closer to school in a few weeks, so I made her a cake.

Unlike the Geode Cake, you don't actually carve anything out of this one.  It just looks like you did.  And it takes a whole lot of frosting to achieve this look.  I'm not a huge frosting fan, which is why I kept putting this off and ended up buying two tubs so I'd only have to make one batch of frosting.  The optical illusion this extra layer of frosting produces is a lot of fun and open to a wide variety of interpretations, from simple sprinkles to elaborate piped designs.

There are two ways to do this cake structurally.  If you're doing a shallow filling like sprinkles, you're going to need at least three cake layers of the same diameter.  For a deeper filling like cookies, candy, or piped designs, the middle layer should be one pan size smaller.  Then you put a cake board on the top layer like a tiered cake and use supports like dowels or boba straws.  I bought sprinkles, so we're doing the first version.  Also, because the yellow cake recipe made three 6" layers of a good height.

I haven't seen any faultline cakes using fondant, but I think it would work.  Drape the whole cake, cut away the faultline, then sprinkle the crumb coat.

1.  Bake, cool, and trim a cake of 3 or 4 layers.  It's physically easier to do round, but there's no reason you can't make this square or any other shape.

2.  Secure the bottom layer to a cake circle with a dab of frosting.  Fill and crumb coat.  The bane of my cake decorating experience.  Keep the outside layer as thin as you can get it, like naked-cake thin.  Chill until very firm.  This is important.  Also, if you use marshmallow fluff as a filling, make sure it's covered.  Mine ended up leaking through.  Spoiler alert.

3.  Smear a thin layer of room temperature frosting where you want the faultline to be.  It's ok to make it a little large, because the top layer of frosting is going to cover it a bit.  Run a scraper around once to make it even.  While the frosting is soft, press on the sprinkles.  This was the first time I had tried to do a tilted sprinkle press.  It didn't go very well, and I'm going to be scraping sprinkles off the floor for a week.  Chill again to make your life easier, but if you're in a rush you can go right into the next step.

4.  Smear on a thicker layer of the final coat everywhere else.  About 1/4" thicker than the sprinkles should do it.  This is where I mixed a can of store-bought into a batch of homemade chocolate buttercream, then accidentally thinned it with a touch too much milk.  The frosting was thinner than it should have been and things got a little messy.  Run the scraper around the cake gently to achieve an even coat, but don't get all the way down to the depth of the sprinkles.  About this point, I decided to do the two-pan-size thing in the future.  During this step, some of the new frosting will splort into the faultline area.  It's ok, and makes the design look more organic.  Chill.

5.  Using edible gold or silver foil, or pearl dust mixed with a few drops of vodka, bling up the edges to make them pop.  You can paint with diluted gel color if you don't want metallic.

6.  Add any decorations you wish to the top or base.  And done!

Difficulty rating  :)