Norman Davis: Hi! I am Norman Davis with The Sweet Life and today we are showing you decorating the cake in fondant. But we have to get started by crumb coating your cake. So, of course, you need your cake, a regular butter knife, loosen the cake, have it come out. Today we are using a combination of chocolate and yellow. At this point, I'd just clean up the ends and then we are going to cut off the tops, because we need to have our cake perfectly leveled. So, just cut off the tops. Now crumb coating, what you are doing is sealing in the crumbs. You are going to take the buttercream and buttercream is a generic term. There are many forms of buttercream, whether it's the crisco-based buttercream or buttercream with real butter and then there is Italian meringue, they are all buttercreams.

So, when I am working with a small cake like this, I like to use a small offset spatula, just a little bit of icing on your cake. Don't worry about the crumbs, that's the purpose behind crumb coating. Take your board, place your cake. Pull off the wax paper. Put the next layer of buttercream and then your next cake. Press it down lightly. Pull off the wax paper and I start by covering the sides first. Because that way, I can use my hand on the top of the cake just to give it some support. You notice, I am using only half of this spatula. I am not covering the whole entire of thing. Because that way, I have more control on pressing the icing where I want it to go. Don't worry about it tearing your cake, because that's going to happen during crumb coating. Now at this point, I'll go ahead and put some buttercream on the top of the my cake, all the way to the end. And you notice, I am pushing the buttercream to the end, I am not pulling it like this, because if you pull your buttercream like this, what's going to happen, it's going to tear the end of the cake. So, it's always best to use the end of your spatula and push your buttercream where you want it to go. So, once I have my entire cake covered in buttercream, I am going to come back and clean it up. Because you don't want any lumps, because if you have lumps, when you cover the cake with your fondant, it will show every imperfection. So you want this part to be as nice as you can make it. Okay. On the top, I am coming half-way in, half-way in again, and then I will clean up my board. I will just take a wet paper towel and clean that up and what I will do then is put this back into refrigerator for at least two hours to have it firm up before we cover the cake in fondant. Our next step we will be needing the fondant and getting it ready to be placed on our cake.