Buttercream Comb Cake and Comb Tutorial

 You guys know that I'm all about some buttercream cakes and when I can duplicate a fondant design in buttercream, well I'm just about the happiest girl on the block!

I made this dummy cake a few weeks ago (so this is actually royal icing, but it still works with the good stuff) and I wanted it to have the look of fondant strips.  It took me a while studying a few I found online in order to figure out just how I needed to make my "grooves" to give me the exact shape I needed.  Then on my first pass I used it upside down!  But it still looked neat, so I realized that I got two looks from the same comb.

So How Do You Make It?

Well, I had several freebie plastic bowl scrapers that I picked up at a food show a few years ago.  They are flexible, but still still sturdy enough to mold buttercream.  At the time of this writing I haven't found a source for you to get these, but I will keep looking and update the post if/when I find some.  UPDATE:  Amazon has this for about a buck each - looks like it would work.

From there I just used a T-Square to cut the side straight (the bowl scraper was originally very curved) and used a ruler to measure each of the indentations on the comb.  Then I used a Sharpie and my ruler to complete the cuts.

The possibilities of this technique are only limited by your imagination.  You could do waves, or even something like dental molding, just keep in mind that you want your design to remain fairly shallow, as we are taking away buttercream, and there's still cake underneath that really needs that buttercream.

What design would you make if you made your own buttercream comb?

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