Claire’s delights celebrating a slice of life
Normally, the cakes, which feature stacked cakes, are layered with icing, to make up for it, Ms Williams said.
“A naked cake is where you can see the cake through the icing, it’s kind of like you’ve scraped the outside icing off and you can see through into the cake,” Ms Williams explains.
“I used to do a lot of cakes, when I first started doing wedding cakes, that had chocolate panels … on the side, and I don’t do any of those now, they’ve just really gone by the wayside,” Ms Williams said.
“They used to be something that was a little bit different to your fondant kind of cake, so if people didn’t like that traditional kind of icing they would go with the chocolate panels.
“But since naked cakes have come onto the scene, and now those drip cake kind of ones, I hardly do any of those (chocolate panel cakes).”
When asked about predictions for future trends, Ms Williams said it appeared the drip cakes are still going “really strong”.
“People are really steering away from that fondant kind of icing, so buttercream — painting with buttercream — is kind of coming in at the moment, so doing lots of different designs,” Ms Williams said.
“Gold’s still really big at the moment, so anything with metallic gold, rose gold, is kind of big,” Ms Williams said.
“But because there’s so many different techniques that are available for cake decorators now, whereas before it was just kind of fondant and icing flowers, now the sky’s the limit, because there’s just so many different elements you can bring in to one cake.”
Ms Williams said she was planning to run a few classes teaching drip cakes, this winter.
“Last year, I ran some drip cake classes. So they come in, the cake’s already cooked, but they learn how to stack two cakes on top of one another, how to cover them with buttercream, do the drip effectively, make the chocolate shards at the back and decorate it with various decorations, like meringues, macaroons, flowers,” she said.