City and State: Fayetteville, AR

This was a birthday cake for a co-worker’s wife. It is a teapot and teacup with saucer.

The cake is a chocolate cake covered with marshmallow fondant colored purple with mocha icing. The yellow roses are fondant with gumpaste. The teacup and saucer are gumpaste.

The cake is two layers baked in a metal mixing bowl filled half-way, inverted on each other.

This was a blast to make and they loved the cake!

City and State: Weston, MO

This is an 8″ inch red velvet cake with homemade cream cheese icing. The cake was made for our vet’s office to say thank you for taking such great care of our dogs. I used a cookie cutter to cut out the dog bones with fondant. The entire dog was also hand made from fondant. The inspiration for the dog came from a YouTube presentation I found. The cream cheese icing is amazing. I don’t even make buttercream icing anymore because this recipe works with any flavor or cake. Google “crusting cream cheese” icing and you will never use another icing recipe again. It really crusts so you can smooth it out almost like fondant. Visit my website to see more views of this cake. http://sites.google.com/site/cakecreationsbyjulie

City and State: Evans, Co

This is a double tier cake, 12 inch round on bottom and 9 inch round for the top. It is frosted with buttercream frosting, using a star tip for the edge and a small dot tip for the black center. The 17 and the larger circles were made with gum past. I finished off the bottom edge with a black ribbon with white polk-a-dots. This cake was made for my cousins 17th black and white Birthday.

City and State: Legana, Tasmania

This was a rectangle buttercake, decorated with fondant in a Spongebob theme for my son’s birthday.

I covered the cake in a thin layer of soft butter icing first, so the fondant woud stick, and to smooth out any bumps in the cake. I used a wooden spoon handle to press in the edges to give the wavy effect.

The rest of the decoration fondant, coloured and shaped appropriately, and then I piped on the centre of the eyes and the eyelashes with black decorater gel.

Obviously your going to need an apron and icing. Decorating cakes is a very messy job so I always keep an apron around. I also find having towels is very handy. Whether I’m washing or cleaning things and keeping things dry.

A pair of scissors, we’ll discuss a few uses for them. Obviously your going to need a frosting spatula. Something to scrape out the bowls when your working, when you’re baking a cake you want to scrape out that batter before you put it into your pans.

How to Decorate a Cake Techniques

Scotch tape, yes we’ll be using scotch tape. Toothpicks are a great thing for using your food colors. Skewers, many bakers use a toothpick to test if a cake is done or not, I use a skewer. Air tight containers also work great.

Now, let me show you a few things that you may not have in your home. There are many types of cake decorating tips, starting with some rounds ones. Tips are numbered to help you identify the size. For example a #3 tip is different than a #12. As you can see when the number is smaller, so is the tip. Those round tips are used for writing and for figure piping.

And then we have star tips. Star tips are used for stars, shells and many other techniques. The one in my left hand is a #16 and this one is a #22. They also range in sizes.

And we have some other specialty tips. These are leaf tips, this is a #67 and one of my favorites, a #349. A little “V” shaped works very well. We also have rose tips. Everyone is always interested in making arose. They come very tiny, a #104 is the most commonly used and this one is even larger.

We have other specialty tips. This one is called a basket weave and that is it’s main purpose. And this one is called a drop flower and they come in sizes, too.

This little tool is the greatest for helping you work with cake decorating. Your going to put this in your cake decorating bag and this fits on the outside with a tip in between. So when you cake decorating and your writing a message and all the sudden you want to do some flowers.

You want to use the same color and the icing is the right consistency.You take off that tip and put on your rose tip and keep working with the same color without having to change or fill up another bag.

Speaking of bags, you have different ones available to you on the market. These are called feather weight bags. They’re a light, plastic material that will work fairly well and last a long time, they’re very durable.

We also have plastic disposable bags. And we have parchment triangles. You can make a parchment triangle into a nice cone so you can work with that.

You also will want to invest in a few spatulas. This one is my favorite because of the angle design. While I’m working on a cake I’m not going to get icing on my knuckles because that allows for some extra room that a straight spatula doesn’t.

The small spatula I use for mixing up my colored icing as well as other small techniques. You may want to invest in this. I keep it in plastic because it is very sharp. But this is a wonderful tool for trimming off your edges and leveling cakes.

Another thing you may not be familiar with are cardboard circles. When I’m working with an eight inch cake I will use one that is the same size as the cake. And I will use two for my base and cover it with a nice decorative foil so that it will look nice once I set my cake on top of it.

Speaking of that foil, here is a nice roll of it. You can use regular aluminum foil, but this has a pretty pattern in it and is great. Another thing that you might not happen to have are little paste food colors. They come in half and one ounce sizes and they last you a very long time.

An extremely helpful tool with cake decorating is a turn table. You find similar ones to this at a department store, they are normally around 14 inches round. Another thing I use often is wax paper. Many of the things I’ve discussed you can buy or be bought at any candy supply and cake decorating store.

Due to the positive response to the first contest, a second contest is beginning immediately. We already have several good entries to review, however not all them will be posted. In the past 95% of entries were posted on the site. This contest will have more stringent judging before a submission is posted.

Besides general quality and creativity, here are the two primary criteria for which all entries will be judged before posting and entry. The same criteria will also be applied when choosing the winners.

1) Picture Quality – Use good lighting. Crop out, remove or use a solid background. Get a close up in clear focus.

2) Description – The description is very important. Descriptive and detailed information about the cake, the decorating techniques you used and any other related information should be included. Descriptions should be a minimum of 100 words, however more is generally better. Proper spelling and grammar is also taken into consideration.

Here are some questions you can answer to help create a better description. These are optional and examples of the type of information we would like to see.

1) What common techniques did I use to decorate this cake? What tools did I use to make it? Even if they seem common knowledge to you, it might be a revelation for a beginner!

2) What did I learn from this cake decoration?

3) What was my inspiration for choosing this decoration?

4) Why do I like to decorate cakes and what experience have I had in cake decorating?

ect…

Thank you all!

Please submit your best entry to our cake decorating contest now.

Thank you to everyone who entered our first cake decorating contest. We appreciate all the entries.

Contest Winner

Congratulations to Luann of Raleigh, NC for her Mrs. Claus Christmas Cake.

Luann is the winner of the contest and the $50.00 Amazon gift certificate.

Here are some other notable entries:

Winner of “Best Description” and “Best Use of Advanced Techniques”
Turkey Cake by Geri

Winner of “Best Birthday Cake” and “Runner Up”
Clown Cake by Milly

Winner of “Best Wedding Cake” and “Honorable Mention”
Eight Tier Wedding Cake by Cris

Winner of “Most Original Idea” and “Special Mention”
Sushi Cake by Alice

City and State: Melbourne, Australia

I used Willow’s sugar glass in yellow and dyed the soft sugar icing a darker shade of yellow (using a little orange) so that the ‘glass’ would contrast.

To get the water effect I used three techniques: 1. used light green dye to get consistent base colour, then created marble effect by putting dots of blue throughout and briefly mixing together; 2. created a ripple effect by puckering the sugar as I laid it on the cake; 3. used a wetting gel to coat entire water to give it a wet look.

To cement the fish in place, I used fetuccini sticks to anchor them in.

City and State: Burt, Mi

I made this wall-e cake for my sons 9th birthday party. It is a three layer Chocolate cake with a peanut butter filling. I used 10 in square pan (3 layers) to create the body and then I used two layers of a 8 inch to sculp and carve the eyes.

I used marshmallow fondant in multiple colors to design the decorations. I prepared his body with yellow fondant. then I car creases in to the body and smeared choc. frosting on to give it a rusted appearance.

The eyes were layered with grey fondant then white then place and then a pin strip to give the three-d appearance. Every thing on the cake was edible except the structure, which was made with pvc pipe and wood, and the greenery that wall-e is holding.

City and State: Dingmans Ferry

A classic Yellow cake w/chocolate pudding filling covered in Black Fondant & royal icing JACK DANIELS logo which I copied from a print from my computer. This was my first time trying fondant, I am 17 years old and new to cake decorating but would like to make it my career.