Know Your Jelly

• Some jellies have a high sugar content and are excessively sweet. Before you use raspberry jelly as a cake filling, taste it and see if it’s too sweet. Find a brand that doesn’t have a high sugar content or one that is sugar-free if you can. Adding too much sweetness to the filling of your cake can overpower the flavor of your cake itself.

Create a Dam

• Jelly isn’t very stable, and once you add the weight of a few cake layers and frosting, your jelly may start to seep out from the edges of each layer, ruining the exterior of your cake. Prevent this by piping a dam around the edge of each layer of cake with a medium-to-thick consistency buttercream. Make a dam that is at least a ½ inch thick so that as the weight of your frosting or fondant settles the cake, the jelly doesn’t seep past your dam and come through your fondant or buttercream finish. Don't try to make a dam by spreading frosting to the edge -- this layer won't be even or thick enough to hold in the jelly.

Add Additional Flavor

• Jellies have no real fruit or texture to them. If you want to give off the flavor and texture of raspberry, add crushed or sliced fresh raspberries to your jelly first. Also, a few drops of lemon concentrate or fresh-squeezed lemon juice can brighten up the flavor of your raspberry jelly.

Pick Complementary Flavors

• Use raspberry jelly to complement the other flavors of your cake. Vanilla and chocolate cakes work well with raspberry. Other cake and buttercream flavors that work well with raspberry jelly can include lemon, orange and almond. If you’re unsure whether or not your jelly pairs nicely with the other flavors, slice a small piece of your baked cake, smear it with jelly and your prepared buttercream and do a taste test before using the jelly as a filling.

Additional Considerations

• Jellies are thin; therefore, a raspberry jelly filling might make your cake soggy. Prevent this by adding a layer of buttercream between the jelly and cake or mixing jelly with buttercream before spreading it on the layer. Also, jelly-filled cakes must be refrigerated. If you’re simply frosting your cake with buttercream, you can lightly cover it with plastic wrap and place it in the refrigerator until it’s ready for serving. If, however, you’re covering it with fondant, you might want to use a different filling, since fondant cakes do not refrigerate well.