Use Frosting As Sugary 'Glue' To Fix Broken Cakes In A Snap

When you bake a cake, a sweet result is what's intended, but sometimes things don't finish up quite how you would hope. Even the simplest recipe is fraught with perils and, if you successfully navigate your way through to what should be a successful ending, you do face one final hurdle if you're making a bundt or layer cake: getting it out of the pan intact. Our favorite workaround involves simply sticking with sheet cakes, then cutting and serving them straight from the pan. Assuming your cake recipe doesn't lend itself to such a hack, though, what can you do if your cake breaks?

While you can always repurpose the broken chunks in cake pops or trifles, there's another way that will allow you to break your cake and eat it, too: Patch it back together with frosting. One thing most frostings have in common, after all, is that they tend to be pretty sticky, the better to adhere to a cake top or sandwich two layers together. This also means that they are ideally suited to re-attaching any clumps of cake that need to be gently pried from the pan.

If you're simply trying to cover up a crack in a cake, you could go with a simple ganache, since an extra layer of chocolate is always a delight. For bigger repair jobs, storebought frosting ought to do the trick assuming you've got a spare tub on hand, or you could make a thick, fluffy homemade buttercream frosting. One tip that would work well with such a frosting would be to mix in some edible glitter or gold flakes, then use this very special icing to turn your broken cake into edible kintsugi. This Japanese art form involves using golden glue to repair shattered pottery, thus turning something broken into an object of beauty.

Mascarpone, too, can also be repurposed as a frosting-cum-cake glue. Try mixing it with a little powdered espresso plus some powdered sugar, then sprinkle your mascarpone-frosted cake with cocoa powder to lend it some tiramisu-like flair. As a last resort, you can always top a really messed-up cake with a layer of ice cream to hold it all together. While you could simply serve the sliced cake a la mode, you might also like to turn it into a homemade ice cream cake. If your decorating skills are really top-notch, you might be able to turn your cake fail into Fudgie the Whale.