Cake Decorating Tips And Tutorials

I had a decorator send me a photo of a cake that had a little garland on it, and she wanted to know what it was made of, and to me it looked like gumpaste. It’s simple to make a gumpaste string of pennants, you just need a little sugar clay and some printed wafer paper. […]

When you put stems of real or artificial flowers, or the wires from gumpaste flowers into a cake, you need to be careful for a couple of reasons. Don’t damage the fondant. First, just randomly sticking something into the cake can ruin the icing or fondant, so pushing stems in can end up making a mess or

When you attach a wafer paper wrap to the side of a fondant cake, you might run into a situation where the top edge of the tier is slightly higher or lower in different spots. The tier might also have areas that are rougher or slightly indented, and if you attach the paper directly to

I’ve done a few cakes that had an iridescent effect on the fondant.  It’s a pretty look, and it makes the cake seem to be different colors when you look at it from different angles.  This feather cake was one of my all-time favorites. (Click here to see some of the other ones.) Make the

I’ve had a few customers send me photos of cakes that have wafer paper flowers with painted smudges on and around the flowers. (After doing some hunting online, I think that the original was made by Maggie Austin Cakes.) One customer asked if I could make the flowers, but the problem with that is that

I decided to try another cake lace DIY recipe recently because I was curious about the unbreakable gel recipe and whether it could be adapted for lace. Edible cake lace is a good medium to use to make realistic lace for wedding cakes that’s more delicate than using fondant in a mold. There are a

Will black icing bleed onto white icing? It’s a common question, especially since most cakes need to be decorated and stored overnight, giving dark icing time to bleed onto the cake if it’s going to do that. As a general rule, you should assume that any dark-colored icing, including buttercream or royal icing, has the

Making chocolate seashells is a fast way to decorate a cake, and they taste better than fondant or gumpaste.  If you want to do some shells that have a few details in contrasting colors on them, it’s pretty easy to do. How to make the chocolate shells. Materials you’ll need: Melt the candy melts or

Making grey fondant would seem to be pretty easy, but because you’ll be using food coloring, the colors can end up looking too purple or green. There are some tricks that you can use to adjust the tint, and it comes down to color theory. Why does food coloring fade? Since food coloring is made

Branches on cakes must be tricky, because I’ve seen a ton of cakes that have branches that look like snakes or large ropes, or worse, on them. If you’re going to do branches or vines, look at some photos of real ones first.  Don’t just start piping a snake of brown icing on the cake, that