Cake Decorating Techniques

Who doesn't like to eat a cake? The sweet taste, the soft cream and the beautiful icing makes it a perfect delicious eatable. Each time you eat that frost cake, you might be wondering how the marvelous job of decoration is done on a cake. Many people love to eat each piece of decoration like the rose or the leaves separately and enjoy its taste bite by bite. Ever imagined of a plain frost cake, without any decoration on its top? It would be surely tasty but most of you won't enjoy eating it. This is the role a cake decoration plays. So, if you make a cake next time to make your child happy or impress your spouse, don't forget to decorate it well. If you don't have any cake decorating ideas, don't worry. Here are some simple cake decorating techniques.

A pastry bag is used as a cake decorating equipment. It has various attachments in the form of tips and it comes in different sizes. The decorative tips are available as round tip, star tip, rose tip, leaf tip, etc. You can use one according to your requirement. Most cake decorating techniques require large amounts of butter cream icing. You can try various icing recipes each time and once you have the great tasting icing, you can follow its recipe for the decorations. You also need various food colors. The basic butter cream icing recipe is white-colored. You can add the colors to make icing of the desired color that suits your cake. An icing nail is needed for making the rose flower decoration.

How to Decorate a Cake?

Messages
Writing a message on the cake is the best way to make it special for a person or an occasion. Various birthday wishes, congratulations message, name of the person or any other text to signify the purpose of having the cake can be used along with other decorations. Writing text in a stylish way can make the cake look extremely beautiful. While writing, make sure that the base is even, if not, use a flat spatula to make it plain. For writing any text, use the round cake decorating tip of the pastry bag.

Borders
No matter whether the cake is round, square, rectangle, heart or mickey-shaped, decorating the border of the cake is a must. If you don't decorate the border and have ample of other decorations all over the cake, your cake is definitely going to look incomplete. Use a star tip and fill the icing in the bag using a color contrast to that of the base. Now, start pressing the bag and at the same time move it around the cake border to form a decorative border design. You can also hold the pastry bag on the border, press it for three seconds, leave it and lift it up. A big patterned dot of icing is right there. Now, move the bag's position and repeat the same process to get the next dot, make sure each dot touches the previous one. A nice patterned border will be formed at the end. You can also make zigzag border pattern. Decorative border is one of the easiest cake decorating techniques.

Roses
Rose flower icing is the most adorned and cute looking part of the decorated cake. Creating rose with icing is an art you'll learn by practice.

• Attach a round tip to the pastry bag. Place a square-shaped parchment paper on the icing nail.
• To start with, squeeze the pastry bag to have a big dot of icing in the center of the icing nail, turn the nail round and simultaneously lessen the pressure on the pastry bag. Stop squeezing once you meet the beginning point and lift up the bag straight upwards. The rose base is ready.
• Now attach the petal tip to the pastry bag and hold its largest part halfway up the rose base over the nail. Squeeze the bag and turn the nail slowly in a counterclockwise direction at the same time. Once you make a full circle, stop squeezing. This is the first and the innermost petal.
• Place the tip overlapping the first petal. Start squeezing and form the next petal turning the nail again in the counterclockwise direction. Repeat the above step about four to five times to form outer petals and each time fill in the areas that are bare with petals.
• Carefully slide off the parchment paper from the icing nail. Keep this paper with the rose aside for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, remove the rose with the help of a knife and slowly place it on the cake.

Leaves
Attach the leaf tip to the pastry bag. Hold the tip at an angle of 45º to the right side. Position the opening just above the cake and lightly squeeze the bag till the leaf base builds up. Continue the squeezing process and draw the tip out away from the base. Stop squeezing further once the leaf of desired length is designed. Lift the tip, make sure the leaves point upwards. Join the leaves by a single up-down line.

Lines
You can use the round tip to draw lines on the cake. Just a few lines drawn in various ways to form a beautiful pattern, can make your cake look attractive in less time. You can draw lines of various colored icing to give a colorful look to your cake. Drawing lines is also amongst the easiest cake decorating techniques.

Decide the design according to the cake size. Don't fill up the entire cake with design, this will make it look weird. If you write text on the cake, do that before any other decoration. Once you complete writing, you can use the remaining space for decorations. Use your creativity to hide mistakes, if any. You can try lifting the icing with a knife if it goes wrong. If you are not confident about doing so, give it another shape or add another color to it and fix the mistake without disturbing other decorations. Be patient and use the various cake decorating techniques to have an icy and savory cake ready to eat.