The Art of Rescuing Last-Minute Cake Fails: A Guide to Saving the Day

As any baker can attest, cake failures are an unfortunate reality of the baking world. But what happens when you're running low on time and your cake has already collapsed? Don't worry, it's not the end of the world! With a little creativity and some quick thinking, you can rescue even the most disastrous of cakes. In this article, we'll explore the art of rescuing last-minute cake fails, from dealing with dripping glaze to saving a collapsing cake.

The First Rescue: Dripping Glaze

When it comes to dealing with a dripping glaze, patience is key. As the gelatin in the glaze sets, wait for about a minute before scraping off any excess and transferring the drips onto a cold plate. Then, put that back in the freezer because it's an ice cream dessert and you want to make your freezer not so cold so that you can cut it when it's time to serve it. By following these simple steps, you can rescue even the most drippy of glazes.

Cake Number Five: The Sweet Shop Cake

The sweet shop cake was a joint effort between Caitlyn and her daughter for her daughter's birthday. The cake itself was baked beautifully, with a beautiful frosting that looked good doing so well. However, decorating with lollies was fantastic, but the finished cake looked great until it smashed. Just as the guests were arriving, the cake collapsed while they were waiting for everyone to arrive. Last-minute cake fails don't give you much time to work, and this particular fail taught Caitlyn a valuable lesson about adding support when going more than two layers of cake high.

The Rescue Plan

When a cake collapses at the last minute, there really isn't much you can do to rescue it. However, if you're short on time, here are a few tricks up your sleeve. First, bake an almond and blueberry cake for the base and use a packet cake for the back because it'll be firmer than a soft moist cake would be. Decorate the cake with frosting and lollies around it, and then add the back into place. As a general rule, if you're going more than two layers of cake high, you need to add support. Watch my Spongebob cake tutorial for tips on how to do that.

Giving It a Shake

If you had just arrived at this party, you would love to have rescued this cake. The mum in the original video has five kids and is currently going through cancer treatment, which is an impressive feat in itself. Well done! However, with a little creativity, even this cake can be saved. By giving it a shake, Caitlyn was able to speed up the process of collapsing, but she knows that ideally, it needs more support than two plastic straws.

Quick Fix

For any damaged areas, get some icing from the back of the cake where no one can see and use it to fix the front of the cake. Use a knife just to neaten it up and take off any frosting that's in the wrong places. For this little cake decoration, just get rid of the top of it that's covered in frosting and put it back where it was, if there's a spare lolly, pop that on top. Even though it's standing, the back still looks a bit sad, so print out a sign and stick it on some cardboard to push that into place.

When It Comes Down to It

When a cake collapses at the last minute, there really isn't much you can do to rescue it. However, the key is to keep smiling – it's just cake at the end of the day, and it's still going to taste good. With thanks to my amazing patrons for your support, I really appreciate it if you enjoyed this video let the algorithm know that you did by liking commenting subscribing and watching again.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enWelcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann Reardon and this is an episode of  Cake Rescue where we take viral cake fails from Youtube, TikTok and across the internet and show  you how to rescue them. Let's start with cake number one ... the frog cake 🐸 This popular frog  cake design and many similar ones came from Oracle bakery in California. Mariola's sister loves frogs  so they are attempting to recreate the frog cake for her birthday and you can see here Mariola  is pouring buttercream on top of the cake that they made. Buttercream should not be thin like  custard this is a red flag already something is very wrong. Now they did manage to spread this out  as best as they could and even pipe some details around the edge that they said were drooping down  and their initial piping of the frog looks great but once they left it for a couple of minutes it  totally collapsed and in their own words: we epicly failed. I'm going to start this rescue  with the buttercream i've got heaps of buttercream recipes for all different flavors on my website  and i'm just using the basic buttercream recipe today now in this case they wanted a dairy-free  buttercream so i'm going to use dairy-free margarine which if you look at the ingredients  is just like normal margarine it's made from vegetable oil the only thing that's missing is  the milk solids which there wasn't heaps of anyway so it's going to be very similar in behaviour to  normal margarine in frosting. Now to start with in this recipe i like to have no liquid at all and at  this point it looks so thick that most people pour in liquid but I want you just to go with  just the margarine and icing sugar, turn up the speed and wait. One minute later and you get this  look how beautiful and thick that frosting is you could pipe it or put it on the side of a cake  and it's not going to flop it's not going anywhere it will hold its shape. Now let me  show you what will happen if i add to that three tablespoons of liquid. Keep in mind this is a  big triple batch of buttercream so that's just like adding one tablespoon to a single batch.  After it's been whipped in it's still firm but it's not as good vertically as before it's a  little bit softer. Now let's add another three tablespoons of milk or milk alternative whatever  you're using and whip that up and you can see it's still okay but it's definitely softer it's a bit  like a whipped cream consistency it's not going to hold on the side of a cake. Now at this point  a lot of people think they can just thicken it up by adding more icing sugar to it but in reality  you'd have to add the whole quantity of icing sugar you had for the recipe to thicken this up.  Let me show you after adding a whole extra cup of icing sugar it's still a droopy frosting.  Now i've added a little more milk into this now and some yellow colouring to get the custardy  consistency that they had in their video. If you're trying to make frosting and it  looks like this i'd say just mix in some eggs baking powder and flour and turn it into a cake  ...make a new batch of frosting in other words. Pipe on the frog and we have recreated the fail  to fix this i would treat the initial thing as a really thin crumb coat we are going to have to  take off any excess sloppy icing that's on the cake or it's going to make everything fall off.  If you were happy with the yellow you could leave it as it is  but i've got a whole fresh batch of icing here so i might as well put some on the cake.  Now that we're using buttercream that has no liquid in it you can see it is  thick it stays where i put it you don't need a turntable to do this you can just use a plate  and spin it on your countertop and just use a knife with a flat edge to straighten it.  Now onto the decorations don't pipe them directly onto the cake put some baking  paper on a tray and we're just going to start with some little mushroom stems just pipe and pull up  then take a small amount of icing and colour it bright red  and put the piping bag on top right in the middle pressing down slightly and then squeeze to make  the top of your mushroom 🍄. Now pipe more of these than you need and then if you make some that flop  over or that you don't like it doesn't matter you don't have to use those you can choose your  favourite ones because they're not actually on the cake yet. If yours are pointy on top like  mine are just wet your finger and pat it down a little bit. Pipe some tiny dots of white all  around the top of your mushroom and when you're done just put that whole tray in the freezer.  Grab another tray line it with baking paper and pipe a mound of green icing for your frog's body,  now use some acetate or you could use some thin cardboard and drag it up the sides to smooth it  out. I really do think Mariola could have pulled this off if she had the right icing and then just  use a wet finger and flatten down the top how you decorate the frog is up to you ... i'm adding five  little white dots for a flower then you need two green dots on top of the head for the eyes this  piping tip is a little bit small for this job and then pipe on some arms. Definitely if you  had a slightly larger tip it would look better use that 😃 you will notice that i have more than one  of these frogs and that again is so i can choose the one that i like the best at the end why not  but if you are a bakery you can see it would make sense for them to make trays and trays  of these at once and then they can just put them on the cakes when someone orders a cake.  Once you've piped on the details put the whole tray in the freezer for at least an hour. Once the  decorations are frozen you can pick them up and position them where you want them on the cake now  if you hold these in your hands obviously they are going to melt so be quick about it while you're  holding it. Use your leftover frog green icing to pipe some little reeds around the top of the cake  and then with the leftover white pipe some extra little flowers like the one the frog  is holding. Choose your favourite frog and put it near the edge of the cake on one side  and then just pipe on a couple of little legs for him  and you have yourself a rescued frog cake! No one would even know that it started with a fail.  Now for cake number two ... the boyfriend cake. Molly wants to make her boyfriend a thoughtful  handmade birthday gift so she's ordered a custom cake topper and is making him a cake. Now by her  own admission she cannot bake so she is starting with two store-bought cakes which is totally fine  it's good to know your limitations. She does realise that this is not straight so she makes  some adjustments and accidentally breaks a chunk off the top of the cake and i'll let  Molly take it from here: the next step is the icing I have tons of this red play-doh looking  substance a little bit of flour i'm just going to warm it up in my hands a bit first is that now  it's covered in the flour marks but i think it'll be fine because i'm going to decorate it anyway so  let's see what i can do. Whoa hold the phone i just like putting a little putting a little  outfit on it i'm getting the cake dressed. Um hi Tom happy 21st i know we were meant to have  just got back from Barli but here's a really good substitute present that's the worst thing you've  ever seen in your life please don't sign me up for Bake Off. It really is not what i saw on pinterest  it's really really not no matter which way i turn this it doesn't improve like got this rigidity  oh it's just not good is it like? I'm not done yet what's the matter with it it? Looks like a  flat tyre! I don't know how to make it better i don't think i can't make it better. Okay let's  recreate the fail using two store-bought iced chocolate cakes and a dash of store-bought icing  to make sure the lumps and bumps under there are the ones that you want to be showing the world.  Second mistake was the flower don't roll your fondant out with flour it will stick to it and dry  out the fondant. The third problem was piping on store-bought frosting it is really soft it's not  ideal for piping because it's just going to droop down which is exactly what happened on her cake.  Now to rescue it ... well personally i wouldn't touch it because it was a gift from her to her  boyfriend she's put in a lot of effort she's even ordered a custom cake topper with his name on it  and i think it's special but if she wanted to fix it and she had a spare half an hour this  is what i'd tell her to do. Take the topper off and keep it safe, pull the flour covered fondant  off she said she bought lots of this so let's just get rid of it the flour's going to make it  taste weird and it doesn't look good so we'll just get rid of that bit. The top cake is split  and cracked and broken so i'm going to remove that one off the top. The bottom one is a whole  cake that's not broken at all so i'm going to use that one for the top by using the broken one on  the bottom it has the support of the baseboard and it's less likely to fall apart but we do not want  it domed it needs to be flat before we add another cake on top. Now here frosting was set a lot  firmer than this one so for that you just use a hot knife and then just cut through the frosting.  Frosting the hotter it is or the warmer it is the softer it is so once you've taken it off the cake  you can actually microwave it for a few seconds to make it softer and then use it on the cake.  Add the cake that's not broken on top and now use the chocolate icing that was salvaged off the cake  to smooth out the sides. She also had that soft store-bought icing which is really  not ideal for this function at all but i need a little bit more frosting so i'll use some of that  just to help fill in all the gaps so that it's not going to have any lumps and bumps that we  don't want, it won't have sharp corners at the top like a perfectly covered cake but it will  be fine. Ideally for this cake i would make a batch of red buttercream and not use fondant at  all but she is limited to store-bought items only nothing homemade so i'm sticking to those rules.  Now grab the fondant and give it a squeeze if it's too hard you can microwave it but just do it for  five seconds at a time you don't want to make it liquid. This one is okay consistency place  it onto some baking paper so it doesn't stick to your counter and then spray it with some vegetable  oil this is just canola cooking oil. Using oil helps stop it stick to the rolling pin and it  also helps stop the fondant from drying out while you're working with it. Then you want to roll that  out into one big circle use the baking paper to help you pick that up and flip it over onto the  cake. Now i know it looks like this doesn't fit but from here you just have to lift and lower  lift and lower. Press it onto the cake around the top where there are no folds and then just keep  lifting and lowering around the base and gently pressing it onto the cake. Once it gets down to  the lower area cut off some of that excess and continue lifting and lowering until it's smooth  on the cake. Use a knife to trim that excess fondant from around the base and now instead of  piping on that soft frosting i'm going to use some compound white chocolate. Just microwave  that for 30 seconds stir and repeat until it's melted then put it into a ziplock bag and cut off  a tiny corner starting on the top of the cake near the edge but not right on the edge pipe a line of  chocolate and then pipe it a little bit more just in sections letting it slowly go towards the edge,  now you can always go back and add more if you need it and so that you can have the  drips wherever you want them on the cake. Add the happy birthday back in the centre  and cover the top with strawberries and chocolates just like it was on the pinterest one she saw.Now for cake number four chocolate glaze ... i'm not actually sure what happened to cake number  three apparently i've forgotten how to count but now that i've animated the title with number four  we're just gonna go with it 😂 ... Andrea is having a lot of trouble with this glaze when you glaze a  dessert the dessert needs to be frozen so that the glaze sets quickly when you pour it over  and you also can't have the glaze too hot or it will melt a layer of the dessert and just slide  off. Which is initially what i thought was going on here that was until i realised she's trying to  glaze an ice cream cake ... now ice cream as you know melts at room temperature so even a slightly  warm glaze is going to melt a layer of ice cream and it will slide off. If you want to glaze an  ice cream cake you're going to need to cover the cake in a layer of something that isn't totally  liquid at room temperature. A ganache made from cream and chocolate is perfect for this.  Freshly made ganache is warm and too runny for our purposes so what you want to do is pour it into a  ziplock bag then seal up the top and flatten it out and just put it in the freezer for about 30  minutes after which time it won't be frozen but it will have cooled enough that it's thick enough to  spread it up the sides of a silicone baking mold. Keep going keep spreading it out until the whole  thing is covered in a thin layer of ganache. Get the ice cream out of the freezer so it can soften  and turn the freezer down as cold as it will go. Choose some chocolate bars that you want to go  inside your ice cream cake and chop those up, now scoop the soft ice cream into the ganache lined  mold. Squash it down and then add the chocolates on top. Now add a layer of different ice cream  and you just want to level that off at the top and put it in the freezer overnight so it can set  really firm. For the glaze put some cream into a bowl and this recipe is on my website for you,  then just add the sugar and the water. Microwave that until the sugar is dissolved then add the  cocoa powder the glucose syrup and the bloomed gelatin and stir it really well. Finally we want  to pour that through a sieve to make sure it's free of any lumps and then we're just going to  cover that and leave it at room temperature. The next day when we're ready to use it it  looks like this ... it's set. Now we want to warm it up slightly to make it liquid but it shouldn't  feel hot so it should be about the temperature of your hand so it shouldn't feel hot or cold  on your hand. If you in the process of melting it in the microwave made it too hot you're going  to have to leave it to cool down. Once you're ready ladle it over the frozen ganache covered  ice cream cake you're going to want to make sure you add enough of that glaze for it to cover  all the sides you don't want any gaps just keep scooping it on and then you just have  to wait about a minute for that dripping to slow down as the gelatin in the glaze sets  and once the drips just stop you can scrape it off around the bottom and transfer it onto a cold  plate and then you just put that back in the freezer because it's an ice cream dessert  and make your freezer not so cold so that you can cut it when it's time to serve it.  Cake number five is the sweet shop cake ... now this cake started out so well it was a joint  effort between Caitlyn and her daughter for her daughter's birthday, the cake itself was baked  beautifully the frosting looked good doing so well, decorating with lollies was fantastic and  the finished cake looks great and then: it smashed didn't it. Just collapsed while we were waiting  for people to arrive. Last minute cake fails don't give you much time to work i mean the guests are  already there let's recreate the fail and see what we can do. I'm baking my almond and blueberry cake  for the base and i'm using a packet cake for the back because it'll be a little bit firmer than  a nice soft moist cake would be. Decorate the cake with frosting and lollies 🍬 all around it  and now i need to add the back into place. As a general rule if you ever go more than  two layers of cake high you need to add support. If you want to know how to do  that watch my Spongebob cake tutorial that's a tall slim cake and you'll know how to do that.  I don't want to wait for mine to collapse it will collapse because it's only cake it  won't stand up on its side for long but i'm just going to give it a shake to speed up the process.  Now if i had just arrived at this party i would love to have rescued this for them. The mum in the  original video has five kids and is currently going through cancer treatment and i'm amazed  that she had energy to make a birthday cake at all. Well done please do go check out her vlogs  and send us some encouragement and your prayers what a champion i'll link to her channel below.  Now that this has fallen once it is going to be even more unstable than it was before  so to sort of quickly rescue it i'm going to push two plastic straws down into the cake.  Ideally it needs a lot more support than this but the guests are already there so it really just  needs a quick fix to make it last just for a few minutes while you're singing happy birthday. For  any damaged areas i'm going to get some icing just from the back of the cake where no one can see  and use it to fix the front of the cake. Use a knife just to neaten it up and take off any  frosting that's in the wrong places and for this little cake decoration we're just going to get  rid of the top of it that's covered in frosting and put it back where it was and if there's a  spare lolly just pop that on top if you've got one. Even though it's standing the back  still looks a bit sad so i've printed out a sign and stuck it on some cardboard so that the oil  from the buttercream doesn't just soak into it as quickly and then just to push that into place.  When a cake collapses at the last minute there really is not a lot you can do to rescue it but  do keep smiling it is just cake at the end of the day it's still going to taste good and it really  doesn't matter. With thanks to my amazing patrons for your support i really appreciate it if you  enjoyed this video let the algorithm know that you did by liking commenting subscribing and watching  \n"