Ruffle cakes are really pretty, but a lot of them are made with fondant, which doesn’t taste that great most of the time.
If you make buttercream ruffles, though, you’ll end up with a cake that more people will want to eat. And it’s not that hard to do, either.
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I did this cake for a recent event, and it was SUPER easy.
I don’t know why I thought it would be more difficult than it actually was, but the whole thing took about 10 minutes, including stopping to reload the icing bag when it ran out.
I’ve seen cakes that have the fat vertical ruffles on the side that are done with a large icing tip, but for me that’s WAY more icing than you need to have on one piece of cake.
Doing the ruffles that go around the entire cake lets you avoid the unnecessary icing buildup.
For an article about wafer paper ruffles, click here.
To do the ruffles on the top, start with a petal tip.
At the very center of the cake, pipe a circle with the wide end of the tip against the cake, holding the tip up at about a 45-degree angle.
As you turn the cake, spiral the tip around so the the bottom edge of the next row fits under the row before it.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, but if you’re not good at staying in a general circle shape, you could mark a spiral to use as a guide on the crumb-coated cake before you start to pipe the icing on.
As you work the way around you’ll end up with a bigger and bigger circle.
Stop and refill the bag if you need to, then just keep going until you reach the edge.
I did the side ruffles first on this, one, but if you do them after the top you can hide the edge of the top with the top row of ruffles on the side.
To do the side ruffles, just go around the cake with the thin edge of the tip pointing up and the thick side against the cake.
After the first row move down and go around again and again until you reach the bottom.
If you’re not good at staying level either, you can mark off the rows on the cake as a guide before you start the same way that I did for this ruffle cake.
When you get to the bottom, just fill in the ruffle, or pipe a flat band around the base.
