Even the most beautiful cake decorations aren’t so beautiful on a lopsided, messy cake. Before you decorate, you’ll need to level the cake layers and fill your layer cake neatly and evenly. The process is simple, and with a few tips and tricks your cakes will look perfect and ready for decorating.
This video shows the basic techniques you’ll need to use to get your layer cake level and filled properly. The key to a neat and even filling layer is to pipe a ring of icing around the outer edge of the bottom layer. The icing acts as a dam to hold the filling neatly in between the layers of cake.
Yesterday, we went over some of the important decisions you need to make in the early stages of planning how to decorate a wedding cake. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the options to consider for wedding cake decorations, toppers, colors, and more.
The decorations you choose may be determined by the wedding theme or formality, or even simply by your comfort level with your decorating skills and the time and budget you have to spend on the cake. For example, if you don’t want the stress of assembling and transporting a tiered cake, you can get a similarly impressive look by using individual cakes on matching cake stands in various sizes and heights artfully arranged on a decorated table.
The actual decorations on the cake can be as easy as a purchased wedding cake topper and fresh flowers or simply piped icing borders, or as complicated as dozens of handmade gum paste flowers and fondant lace. If you have the time and patience, gum paste flowers can be made well ahead of time and stored, so you can take your time making lots of them for a beautifully covered floral cake. If that’s too intimidating or time-consuming, try a similar design with fresh or silk flowers. Either way, these are things to decide early when planning how to decorate a wedding cake. There will be enough preparation to do as the wedding day approaches without having to worry about trying to find the perfect cake topper at the last minute.
Before any baking can begin, you’ll also need to choose the flavors of the cake, icing, and filling, and find or create a recipe for each. Colors will also come into play at this step, as you decide whether to make a very traditional white cake or something more modern. The icing and decoration can have subtle touches to match the wedding color scheme, or the entire cake can be boldly matched to the wedding colors.
Planning how to decorate a wedding cake is not complicated, but it is an important step that should be considered carefully. When the wedding day arrives and your beautifully decorated cake is the focal point of the reception hall, you’ll know that the time spent planning how to decorate a wedding cake was well worth it.
Online cake decorating courses will help you make these decorating decisions and teach you everything you need to know from filling a layer cake and getting smooth icing to assembling a tiered wedding cake and transporting it to the reception. Take cake decorating classes on the Internet and make a beautiful cake!
If you’re an amateur cake decorator thinking of making your first wedding cake, you may feel overwhelmed before you even begin. There are lots of things to consider and many decisions to make in the planning stages of how to decorate a wedding cake. Make the project more manageable by addressing all of these things well ahead of the final days of baking, decorating, and assembling.
To begin, you’ll want to be sure you have enough cake for all the guests, so the size of the cake is an important decision and one that may affect your decorating choices as well. Then there are the obvious and fun selections of flavors and colors that might be the first thing you’ll consider.
Equally important in planning how to decorate a wedding cake are the choices for the type of icing and decorations you’ll use. These decisions may be based on which decorating materials you’re most comfortable working with or what type of look you want to achieve. In the planning stage, you’ll need to make some decisions and get at least a general idea of how the cake will be decorated.
The size of the guest list will determine the minimum size of the cake, although for larger parties the display cake can be supplemented with plain sheet cakes for serving. They’re easier to cut into servings, and using them frees up some decorating time and expense so you can spend more of these resources on the display cake.
At this point in planning how to decorate a wedding cake you’ll also need to decide which type of icing and decorations will be used. Buttercream icing is simple to make and use and has a great flavor. Fondant, on the other hand, looks terrific, with a sleek, professional finish, but it’s a little more challenging to learn to use. Store-bought prepared fondant can be expensive and usually doesn’t taste very good. A homemade marshmallow fondant is much tastier and is inexpensive to make.
Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at the wedding cake decorations, toppers, and colors.
The intimidating process of how to roll out fondant on a cake is really quite simple when you see it demonstrated. This video shows you how to knead and roll fondant and use it to cover a cake smoothly and evenly for a flawless finish. Learn more about how to work with fondant here.
Sleek and smooth fondant covering on a cake is the ultimate canvas for beautiful decoration. For many cake decorators, learning how to work with fondant frosting is intimidating. What they don’t know is that easy fondant decorating is possible for anyone with the right information and a little bit of practice.
How To Work With Fondant To Cover A Cake
Easy fondant decorating begins with a perfectly covered cake. When you’re learning how to work with fondant, this is the first step you’ll want to practice. Begin with a dense cake, because a fluffy cake can collapse under the weight of the heavy covering. Cover the entire cake with a smooth, even layer of buttercream icing. This layer will help your fondant covered cake look better by smoothing over any flaws in the surface of the cake, and it will also help the final layer stick.
Next, measure the cake to know how big your rolled covering will need to be. Be sure to measure up one side, across the top, and down the other side, and add an extra inch or so. Sprinkle your work surface and the fondant with cornstarch, and knead until it gets soft and pliable.
Dust your rolling pin with cornstarch and roll out the fondant frosting to about 1/8-inch thick and wide enough to fit your measurements for the finished fondant covered cake.
Carefully roll the frosting onto the rolling pin and move it to the cake. Position the loose edge at the bottom edge of the cake with a little bit of overhang and slowly unroll over the top. Hold the rolling pin a couple of inches over the cake as you do this so the covering can gently fall into place. Let the sections on the sides of the cake drape loosely for now.
Smooth the top surface of the fondant covered cake with a smoothing tool or with your hands. Use a gentle buffing motion with very light pressure to get a perfectly smooth surface. The buttercream icing underneath will give a little, so you can smooth out any bumps and even sculpt subtle details if you’re making a shaped cake.
When the top of the fondant covered cake is smooth, work your way around the sides as you push the covering into the sides of the cake. Use a pizza cutter or sharp knife to trim the excess fondant frosting neatly around the base of the cake. Use your hands to smooth the sides and press in any loose spots with your fingertips.
Add Finishing Touches And Fix Mistakes
Get creative to finish your easy fondant decorating and fix any mistakes in your fondant covered cake. Clean up the bottom edge of the frosting with a a simple design of fondant rope, piped buttercream icing, or even fresh flowers. Make easy fondant decorations for the cake top by cutting shapes from rolled fondant and pressing them on the cake with a little bit of water to help them stick.
Learning How To Work With Fondant Takes Practice
Your first tries at fondant decorating may not turn out as well as you’d like, but with practice you’ll find that fondant decorating will get easier. Making a fondant covered cake is only the beginning. When you’ve mastered this first step in how to work with fondant, you’ll want to try easy sculpted bows, ribbons, flowers, and more. When you learn how to work with fondant, there’s no limit to the easy fondant decorating designs you’ll be able to create.
If you want to make learning how to work with fondant even easier, view video demonstrations of the techniques and decorating ideas described here as part of an online cake decorating course. We’ve made it easy to find the best cake class options by ranking the top 5 online cake classes for you.
With no formal training, wedding cake decorating can be overwhelming. The truth is, learning how to decorate a wedding cake is not difficult, but it is a bit complicated, with a lot of techniques and tools that you’ll need to know how to use. The best way to learn how to decorate a wedding cake is to take an online cake decorating course, which you can do entirely on your computer, on your own schedule and from your own kitchen. With some instruction on the recipes, tools, and techniques you’ll need, anyone can learn how to decorate a wedding cake.
Steps To A Beautiful Cake For A Wedding
Most wedding cakes are elaborate creations with several tiers and layers and extensive decorations. Regardless of the style and complexity, even these spectacular creations come down to a few basic steps and components.
Planning
Preparing Ingredients
Assembling, Decorating, & Transporting
Serving
Planning How To Decorate A Wedding Cake
In the planning stage of decorating a wedding cake, you’ll want to decide your icing and filling flavors. You’ll need to make at least general decisions about how it will be decorated, including whether you will build it in tiers. Your online cake decorating course will have all the information you’ll need for building tiers, but the process will be fairly complicated, so it’s something to consider carefully.
This is also a good time to consider not only the design of the cake decorations but also the materials and ingredients the design will require. Will you use buttercream icing or rolled fondant? Handmade gum paste flowers, icing flowers, real flowers, or no flowers at all? If you’re not sure, review these sections in your online cake decorating course to see which techniques will work best for your design and skills.
Preparing The Cake & Icing Ingredients
Your online cake decorating course will include lots of recipes for cake, icing, and fillings, and even more recipes can be found in books and on other websites. If possible, test the recipes for your top choices to be sure you get good results and find flavors you like.
Well before the wedding date, review the guidelines for preparing ahead and storing cake, icing, and decorations, and make a schedule. The cake can be made ahead and frozen if you have the freezer space. Gum paste flowers will last for weeks. Knowing these things early in your planning will help you make the best use of your time and save stress as the wedding day approaches.
Assembling, Decorating, & Transporting
You may think that assembling, decorating, and transporting are three very separate steps, but the order you’ll do these things depends on the type of design and where it will need to be transported. With a tiered cake, you may want to assemble it after you transport it to the reception site, which will mean you’ll also need to be prepared to add a few finishing touches to the decorating at that time too.
Serving A Wedding Cake
Depending on the services provided at the reception, you may not need to worry about serving. If you will be responsible for the serving, make sure you’re aware of portion sizes and how to slice large, complicated cakes by reviewing these topics in your online cake decorating course.
Learn How To Decorate A Wedding Cake
Learning how to decorate a wedding cake will likely require much more detail than you can get from reading this article. Taking an online cake decorating course will fill in those details and many more, so you’ll know exactly how to decorate a wedding cake or any other type of baked dessert. When you decorate your own desserts, you’ll get the design you want while saving money, enjoying a hobby, and impressing your friends and family.
As you can see, you can get the detailed, step-by-step video and written instructions for all aspects of how to decorate a wedding cake with an online cake decorating course. With planning and an internet cake course for reference, anyone can successfully learn how to decorate a wedding cake.
Do you love baking cakes? Then you might be interested in cake decorating instruction. A delicious cake is that much better with beautiful decoration. Fortunately, online cake decoration courses offer an inexpensive and convenient way to learn how to decorate cakes.
Getting cake decorating instruction online holds plenty of advantages for people who want to learn how to decorate cakes but do not have the time or the resources to enroll in actual classes. With an online class, you can learn cake decorating in the comfort of your own home and at your own pace. This is more convenient than traditional classes at a culinary school, especially for people who are busy working or caring for children during the day.
Internet cake classes also provide the added advantage of allowing you to review the instructions over and over again if you did not understand it the first time. In addition, online courses are generally very affordable as well as all-inclusive. Most of the courses include every aspect of cake decorating from basic to advanced techniques.
Instead of having to pay for and attend separate classes for each technique you want to learn, you can purchase one online class that includes everything. If, for example, you are only interested in learning to make icing flowers right now, an online course will show you this with the freedom to repeat the section until you master it. Later, when you are making icing flowers with ease, you might decide you would like to move on to working with fondant. Instead of searching and paying for a fondant class that fits your schedule and budget, you will simply be able to go back to your online course to work through the fondant section.
As you have learned from above, there are many advantages to getting cake decorating instruction online. Internet cake courses are less expensive and more convenient than traditional in-person classes, and they provide more freedom to learn the techniques that interest you, and at your own pace. With little expense or inconvenience, an online cake course will have you making beautifully decorated cakes in no time.
You don’t have to wait for a special occasion and spend a small fortune at a bakery to enjoy a beautiful cake. You can learn easy cake decorating ideas that you can do yourself to make even an ordinary boxed cake mix look extraordinary. With a few simple tools and techniques and the easy cake decorating ideas in this article, you’ll be able to make a beautiful cake yourself at home.
Icing The Cake
Most of the time, you’ll want to start with smooth icing all over the cake. To get a smooth surface, make sure the cake is completely cooled and your frosting is not too thick. Thinner icing will spread more easily and end up with a smoother finish.
First, put a very thin layer of frosting all over the cake. This is called the crumb coat, and it will keep crumbs from getting mixed in with the frosting that you’ll see on the finished cake. At this point, you can refrigerate the cake to set the crumb coat and make it easier to apply the top coat.
Next, use an icing spatula to put on the second coat of icing. Start with a large amount of icing in the middle of the top of the cake and spread it toward the edges. When the top of the cake is completely covered, cover the sides of the cake. To smooth the sides, hold the spatula straight up and down and hold the edge against the cake as you spin the plate.
For the best look, try to get the frosting as smooth as possible all over cake. For the top of the cake, hold the spatula perfectly horizontal. For the sides, hold it perfectly upright. Try dipping the spatula in hot water and drying it before gliding across the frosting for even smoother results.
Getting smooth, even icing on your cakes is probably the hardest part of cake decorating. Practice these techniques until you can get perfectly smooth frosting, and you might find that you don’t even need any other cake decorating ideas for an elegant, beautiful cake.
Simple Cake Decorating Ideas
For a simply elegant cake with a really easy technique, dust your frosted cake with powdered sugar. Try using a stencil for a themed or geometric design on the top of the cake. Remember making paper snowflakes as a kid? Make one to fit the top of your cake and use it as a stencil for a one-of-a-kind powdered sugar design.
If you want a more detailed, three-dimensional design, you can buy ready-to-use decorations and cake toppers in just about any theme you can think of. Candy flowers and letters, sprinkles in special shapes, and even small toys can be used to top your cake.
For an especially tasty look, sprinkle the cake with candy, nuts, shredded coconut, or chocolate shavings. Or use fresh fruit, like a simple ring of strawberry slices or an elaborate pattern of a few kinds of fruits. For a different style, decorate only the sides of the cake and leave the top smooth, or surround a simply frosted cake with fresh fruit or flowers.
Another option is to use a decorating comb or decorating triangle to add texture to the frosting. A decorating comb is a simple piece of plastic or metal with a variety of shaped edges. You drag the comb along the frosting to leave a textured pattern in the frosting. This is a great option if you’re having trouble getting your icing as smooth as you want it to be.
Anyone Can Master These Easy Cake Decorating Ideas
These easy cake decorating ideas will help you make all your cakes more beautiful and are easy enough for anyone to learn. Master these techniques, and then consider taking cake decorating classes locally or online to learn more advanced cake decorating ideas and techniques like piping with a pastry bag and using fondant.
Do you wish that you could learn how to decorate cakes and cupcakes? If you’ve ever considered taking a course to learn to decorate cakes but found that the time or expense didn’t work for you, you might consider online cake decorating classes as an easy alternative. There are plenty of cake courses available at culinary schools and some craft stores, but online cake decorating classes are generally more convenient and less expensive and may fit your lifestyle better.
Decorating cakes is not complicated, but there are techniques and tools that you’ll need to learn to use, and your first attempts at it may not turn out quite the way you want them to. With the demonstrations and explanations you’ll get from online classes, however, you’ll be able to master these techniques and create beautiful cakes for all your important celebrations.
Options for Learning To Decorate Cakes
For many beginning cake decorators, the Wilton School in Illinois is the first choice for attending a class. Obviously, traveling to Illinois is not an option for many people, and the classes at the Wilton School can be expensive. Local stores and schools are another option for taking cake courses. The workshops and classes offered at these locations are often very affordable, and the atmosphere is fun and instructional. For the greatest convenience, online cake decorating classes are the best option for many aspiring cake decorators.
Benefits Of Online Cake Decorating Classes
Membership sites and e-courses are generally very inexpensive when you consider that they are all-inclusive. While local classes usually focus on specific topics, such as making icing flowers or working with fondant, online cake decorating classes include all aspects of decorating cakes, and all of the learning resources are available to you at all times.
Instead of an instructor demonstrating a technique once in front of you, with online courses you’ll have videos, written or audio instructions, and plenty of photographs to learn from, so you can repeat the instruction as often as you need to. If you’ve never decorated cakes before, you can start with the most basic topics and take your time mastering each technique. If you’re more advanced, you’re free to skip through the demonstrations of the things you already know how to do, and get right ahead to learning new techniques.
For many people, the greatest advantage in taking cake courses online is that you’re free to set your own pace and schedule. You can take online classes late at night if you need to, or in between taking care of small children at home. No culinary school or craft store class will offer such flexibility.
How To Take Online Cake Decorating Classes
Most online cake courses will include several means of instruction. Cake courses taken on the internet usually include a combination of videos, pictures, and written instructions. Techniques will be explained and demonstrated step-by-step and will often be in the form of a downloadable e-book that can be viewed on screen or printed out. Most online cake classes also include e-books full of recipes for you to use in your baking.
Another online alternative for taking decorating courses is to join a membership website. A website like this is full of articles, videos, and photos that teach techniques and give decorating ideas. All of the content is available to subscribers only, and the subscription will also provide access to a members-only forum and email support for asking questions, sharing your creations, and getting new ideas. Professional cake decorators are on staff to help with questions in the forum or by email.
Try Learning To Decorate Cakes With An Online Course
Anyone with an interest in learning to decorate cakes should consider online cake decorating classes. You’ll avoid the expense and inconvenience of attending in person, while learning everything you need to know to make beautiful cakes that will impress your friends and family and make all your celebrations more special.
Wondering how you can find cake decorating instruction on the Internet? We’ve ranked the top 5 online cake decorating classes to make it easy for you to find the best course for you.
