How To Choose The Best Edible Gold Leafing Effect on Cakes

 

The first thing you want to do is start out with a fondant-covered cake. Now I always go with white, so the color doesn't seep through. I had a kind of an orangey white fondant underneath and you can see that has seeped through and has colored it. It won't do it right away, but it will do it eventually, so I would stick with white fondant.

You want to have your gold leafing path kit

You want to make sure that all the air in the house is turned off. If there's a breeze at all, you're going to have a problem. And then you want to get a steamer. Now if you don't have a steamer, you can brush your cake lightly with some water but the steam is going to give it this beautiful coat of moisture that the edible gold leaf is going to stick to really nice, really evenly.

So to start out with, take your steamer and just go up and down the fondant on your cake and have my cake on a turntable, so I can just keep turning as I go and you'll know you're at the end when you get back to where it is glossy and then just to go across the top. Now be careful, these can drip and you don't want any drops on here, because that will actually eat away more fondant than just the steam will, so you want to be careful. Now your cake should have this beautiful shine to it. In fact, when I want a shiny cake this is what I do. It doesn't last forever though. It's not a permanent shine.

Now you want a very soft, soft, soft brush. You can buy them in the cake aisle at a lot of stores, like a specialty cake one, but honestly, as long as it's one that you don't cross-contaminate you can use any brush you find anywhere craft store, cake decorating store, even a makeup aisle. So I like to get really cheap soft brushes. Just don't accidentally use them for makeup. Anyway, this is going to be our nice, soft touch so really, really soft, not bristly in any way.

So now open up your gold leafing. Now in order to be edible, it needs to be 24 karat gold, so it does get expensive. So hold your booklet nice and taut. We're going to come over here and match up the edge of our Edible gold leaf with the edge of our cake and peel away. And now we're going to line it up with the bottom of the cake and with the previous one, we just did. And peel away. 

Now, I accidentally put mine a little bit too far apart right there and so to make up for it, I'm taking my packet and I'm folding over just a corner so I'm only showing and an itty bitty bit of the goal of this leaf and I'm going to match it up with this line, press it down, and then holding my booklet I'm going to peel it away and that left the rest of that square that I can use another time, and that's a great way to do patching. I usually use one square that I kind of keep just for patching. You can see I have just a small space left over here. I'm going to go back to that piece I was using for my patch job. 

For the top, lay it down on top of the last, brush it over, and then lay down those corners. Flip over and do the top center and then you just keep patching away until you're happy with it. Now I will warn you, at some point, it's going to just not stick anymore. There's going to be spots that are just always going to be white, whether they weren't tacky enough to begin with, or maybe your finger touch them and got it to unstick, or you maybe you scratched something on accident, or maybe this brush ended up getting something hard on it.

I don't know what the reasons are but there's just sometimes little spots that just don't stick and you've just got to stop because if you keep trying to patch, you're going to hit the point that it's going to end up causing more damage scraping more off rather than filling the hole, so it's finding that happy medium.

One last word of warning. Your hands have natural oils on them that will just destroy this leafing. So once it's done, try to keep any touching, whether it's stacking it on the rest of the cake, or adding decorations, to a minimum. Make sure your hands are clean and dry every time that you touch them.