Cake decorating

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

When you color gumpaste or fondant with luster dust to get a good shine on edible jewels, you can end up with streaks or a mediocre shine. That’s because luster dust is dry and it’s not formulated to be used as a paint, so it doesn’t always dissolve evenly.  You can mix it with water,

Fondant and gumpaste popcorn that most people make is pretty cartoon-y, which is fine if you’re going for that look.  If you want to make more realistic popcorn, though, you should get some real popcorn to study first, then ditch the cutters, since you don’t need them.  If I’m going to go to the trouble

Stenciling onto buttercream isn’t as hard as you might think, but you do have to take a few precautions. I did a few stenciled wedding cakes that were covered in buttercream, so I took notes on things that I would tell other bakers who were going to try it. For both of these cakes, I

I had to do some luster dusting of some red fondant pearls last week, right at the same time a question came up on a cake forum about the best way to pearlize colored pearls so that the color didn’t disappear. I’ve used regular pearl dust on colored pearls before, and it basically changes the