Here’s a quick look at how to make some chocolate leaves, which can be a nice change from gumpaste. I actually used candy melts for these, but real chocolate would taste better! What leaves to use. Start with some leaf presses or veiners, or some real rose or lemon leaves. It’s best to use leaves that […]

There are a couple of ways to make tomato sauce for pizza cakes (or spaghetti cakes) but the important thing is to make sure the “sauce” will set up firmly enough that you’ll be able to use it the way that you need to without it dripping all over the place. One method is to

Whenever I make marbled fondant I tend to overuse the darker color. The key to marbling is to really use a minimal amount of the contrasting color, or you’ll end up having a big blob of uncontrasty fondant. I did these shells and started with what I thought was a small amount of black fondant,

Piping gel is a sugar-based gel that’s made from corn syrup and thickeners, and it’s basically a less-sticky version of corn syrup. You can use it to paint onto cakes to attach things, or to attach wafer paper to itself or to cakes. It’s a type of edible glue that’s pretty versatile for lightweight purposes.

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. Make the iridescent feathers. To get the iridescent look, start with

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