I have a request for a cake without icing, or minimal icing between layers.  She wants the raw edges of the cake showing.  

1.  How do I make the raw edges pretty?  Mine never look like the raw-edge cakes you see in the photos. They're much more solid brown, with maybe a few flakes.  I never see white through my cake edges.  

This is an example she sent me:  

2.  I'm most concerned about delivering a cake with hard, crusty edges.  Gross!  How do you keep the cake edges from turning hard?  

Thanks for your help.  

Lisa

These cakes are generally called naked cakes. I have had to do a couple and it totally messes with my weekly schedule. If delivery is for a Saturday, I would bake on Friday, cling wrap them overnight to settle, then on Saturday torte, fill and stack. You can't do it much earlier since it is difficult to keep cakes that are filled but with nothing around the sides wrapped up because the cling film would touch the icing and make it messy, and just putting it in a cardboard cake box will dry the edges out. I would advise the customer that the edges may be slightly drier than normal, even though it was baked only the day before. You could apply some simple syrup I guess.

Remember that icing sugar/confectioners sugar will not stay powder like if there is any moisture on the cake at all...it just turns into a kind of transparent spotty glaze.

Most brides don't realise that almost all the pretty cakes on Pinterest are not real wedding cakes. For Pinterest you can get away with making the cake days in advance and then prettying it up. These cakes look easy, but in actual fact it is difficult to make a neat and "sloppy" cake at the same time. Google naked cakes and you will see all sorts of different ways of doing them, and some really look very sloppy indeed. All the others, are on Pinterest..... 

Forgot to say that I don't know how that top tier is soooo white. Mine don't look like that either. Maybe they chilled it well and shaved the edges very carefully to show the crumb, alhough it doesn't look like the crumb of any cake I've seen...

Thank you, yes.  I agree that this kind of cake poses special problems and I've received an entire Pinterest Board from this "customer" who also happens to be a relative.  She wants this for her 40th birthday at a club where her favorite band is playing.  It's a challenge to say the least.  There is no kitchen for me to assemble on site and even the drive is an hour from my kitchen. 

I agree that the powdered sugar is the first detail to be chucked out of the design, as there is no way to make that work in this circumstance.  

Thanks for the feedback.

Lisa

You definitely need to stack on your own premises and get it cold somehow before delivery. I never fridge my cakes for delivery but I did for these ones. I use SPS so I wasn't concerned about the whole stacking issue, but I felt more comfortable with a cold cake to deliver. I concealed the plastic separator plates and cake cardboard with a squeeze of BC around the base of each cake, and I felt it helped to just anchor and glue the whole thing together. In that pic she sent they've used rosemary and you can't see the bases but if you start with a clean canvas of cake, the deco will look lovely however it's done. 

Funny how you get so comfortable working with ganache and fondant and stuff, but what appear to be the easiest cakes in the world are an absolute nightmare!