Although, I have become mostly a fondant wedding cake designer, like you, I started out doing all of my cakes in buttercream. Smoothing buttercream as perfect as possible is an art and a learned skill. There are many ways of doing it and we will discuss some of the those techniques in the upcoming buttercream series of classes.
One of my favorite techniques that I love is the basket-weave technique. Not only is it cool that you can create the look of a basket with just a piping bag, tip and some medium consistency buttercream. The result looks like you spent hours upon hours working on the cake. Actually, it is a very simple technique to learn and just takes some practice as does anything new. Learning which tips to use, how to hold your pastry bag properly, and what consistency of icing to use whether it be royal icing or buttercream. The movement is very patternistic and repetitive. Once you understand the movement you will develop a rhythm and the decorating goes very quickly. Not to mention it might even cover up a few crumbs here and there….not that any of us have ever had crumbs on our cakes before. Not us!! LOL!
Here is a beautiful example of a large three tiered cake I did a few years back for a June bride. The wedding was outdoors in her backyard under a tent. Let’s just say it was Houston, TX, hot and humid in Nashville, TN that evening. But, the cake held up nicely. The only little problem, to my surprise, was that the raspberries I placed on the cake layers broke down a bit and ran, but I decided to leave them alone. I thought it looked really pretty and even more delicious! By the way, this was my first attempt at a basket-weave cake!
Check out my free demo about how to do two different types of basket-weave patterns. A flat basket-weave, like this one and a round basket-weave.