Wine Bottle Cake Tutorial

Cake designed by Brenda, owner, Brenda's Dream Cakes

Brenda, owner, Brenda's Dream Cakes, is a fabulous cake designer and member of NYC Cake Decorators. Her wine bottle cake is just the right kind of bubbly for your New Year's Celebration.

Use a heavy firm recipe like pound cake for the bottle. Use 3 empty vegetable cans. Coat 2 of the cans very well with a non-stick spray and fill 3/4 of the way to the top. For the top of the bottle, use a heavy aluminum foil to get a mold of a real bottle, then fill the mold 3/4 of the way with batter and let it rest inside the 3rd can. Make sure you spray the inside of the foil first so the cake will pop out.

After the cake is baked, remove carefully, cover with plastic immediately, and pop the pieces in the freezer until frozen solid. After they are frozen, trim the 2 main pieces to make the body of the bottle. Brenda used to use a skewer through the center but she recently decided it's not totally necessary. Coat thinly with buttercream. Add the top piece being VERY VERY careful. After coating with buttercream completely, freeze solid again. Even when frozen, the tip will be fragile. Remove from freezer and smooth out rough edges.

Prepare your fondant and trim to the correct size by molding over a real wine bottle. Quickly move the fondant to the bottle cake. Move the bottle to the base cake carefully. Brenda prefers to use drape-type fondant to look like fabric that the bottle is resting on, but she has used shaved white chocolate and shaved coconut to surround the bottle as well which looks like packing material. You will need to carve a space out of your base cake so the bottle can sit into it.

To color the bottle: Burgundy and brown food coloring gel with just a touch of almond extract. Paint this on the bottle VERY VERY thickly and evenly with ONLY downward strokes until you get the glassy appearance. This will take at least a day to dry.

Brenda paints her bottle cake after it's sitting in place on the main base. If you do this, be very very very careful to not get any coloring on the light fondant "fabric". You'll regret it.

Brenda uses a fondant/gumpaste mix for the very top "foil" of the bottle. Mold this a day in advance and let dry on the real bottle. You will have to trim the top of the cake to get it to fit and be very careful to leave an opening on the fondant so you can get it off the top of the real bottle without cracking. Paint with gold highlighter.

Brenda cuts out her main label a day in advance also and lets it dry on a real bottle. Design the label as you wish. Brenda usually takes gets inspired from real wine labels.

Sides of box that look like wood are cut the night before and left to dry before placed on cake. Score with a toothpick then paint with a thin ivory/brown gel coloring until look of wood is achieved.

Happy Baking!