Using air-dry buttercream flowers is a fast way to decorate a cake, and this kind of edible icing flowers has some distinct advantages over gumpaste or royal icing flowers.
To read about how to make air dry buttercream and use it to make flowers, go over to this article, then come back for the specifics about how to decorate a cake with them: Air Dry Buttercream
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What is air-dry buttercream?
Air-dry buttercream is basically an American buttercream icing that has no dairy in it, so it’s able to dry out so that you can handle it. It’s not perishable, and you can let the flowers dry at room temperature for a few days (or weeks) then use them when you’re ready.
You can make your flowers ahead of time, then place them on your cake when you’re ready to decorate. It cuts down on the decorating time if you don’t have to make the flowers as you’re decorating the cake.
You can color air-dry buttercream like any other icing. For these flowers, I used the Americolor Student Set #2 (see it here on Amazon #ad)
I also have an article showing the colors that are included in the set here.
To watch the video of the decorated cake, click here:
Adding air-dry flowers to the cake.
If you have a cake to decorate, you can make the flowers ahead of time, then decorate when you need to.
To decorate a cake with any kind of flowers, you should put the largest ones on first to define the shape of the floral design.
With air-dry buttercream flowers, you can stick them directly to the icing on the cake without using any kind of wires or picks. They’ll stick to the cake and start to soften up as they absorb oils from the icing on the cake.
When it’s time to cut the cake, you won’t need to worry about removing any wires or toothpicks, you’ll be able to cut right through the flowers and the cake without worrying about any non-edible elements.
Put the larger flowers on the cake, adding the heaviest ones at the bottom and putting the other ones on the cake where they can rest on the larger ones for support.
Handle air-dry buttercream flowers carefully, because they’ll dry out enough to handle them, but they’ll still be “crushable.”
When you have all of the larger flowers on the cake in the main shape that you want them in, you can start adding the smaller flowers and leaves as filler.
Add the leaves and filler flowers.
With the larger flowers in place, add the smaller flowers in between and around the large ones to fill in gaps in the pattern.
Air-dry buttercream icing leaves can be stiff enough to stand up and away from the cake, but they can sag if they get soft while they’re on the cake, so be careful if you’re going to put them on the cake a long time before serving. If the time between decorating and serving is short, you can stick them into the icing and let them stand up off of the cake.
For an article showing how these look on cupcakes, click here.
Finish the cake design.
Make sure that you’ve filled in all of the largest gaps using the leaves and smaller flowers, then take a look at the overall look of the cake to make sure everything looks balanced.
There’s no secret to this, it’s just a matter of looking at the cake and making sure that the colors look nice and that you have a good assortment of colors and shapes.
If anything looks “off” to you, you can remove the flowers and leaves carefully to adjust the section that need to be rearranged. Just be cautious when you’re grabbing the icing flowers so that you don’t crush them if they’re still soft inside.
More decorating design options.
This wedding cake had air-dry buttercream roses and filler flowers on it.
Since they’re light, you can attach them directly to the icing on the cake and not worry about using toothpicks or wires. They’ll stay on the cake if you use a little icing to stick them on.
You can use air-dry buttercream to pipe any kind of flowers that you want to.
You can also pull the flowers off of the waxed paper or parchment paper once they’re dried for a couple of days, and add more icing to the back if you want them to be rounder.
You’ll dry them upside down at that point, so you really need to make sure that they’re dry enough to handle before you do that. It will give you some different shaped to work with in the arrangements, though.
Icing flowers are a really pretty and classic way to decorate a cake, and air-dry buttercream is a convenient way to make the decorating really easy.
Give it a try and leave a comment to tell me how it worked out for you!
