Just about anything can be used to decorate the top of a cake.
With everyone watching their diets and wanting to eat healthy foods, having cake is something special in many households. It's only right then to make the cake even more special by decorating it in unique and beautiful ways. Luckily, there are a few simple and easy ways to do just that. Add this to my Recipe Box.
Patterns in the icing
Nothing can be easier than swirls and small candies.
The very easiest cake decorating uses the spatula or knife that you have used to frost the cake. Lay your knife flat on the icing and pull upwards quickly, creating a peaking effect with the icing. Repeat this all over the top of the cake. You can also use the knife to create swirls. Drag a fork through the icing in "s" curves to create wavy patterns.
Piping
Create a lily of the valley flower with icing lines and beads.
Although it's helpful, you do not need a professional piping kit to create piped decorations. A plastic baggie with a small cut at the tip of one corner will work too. Easy piping decorations include beads, borders and certain flowers. To make beads, squeeze a dab of icing from the baggie onto the cake. Move the tip of the baggie down to the end of the bead and stop squeezing. Then pull the tip up and away. Begin the next bead slightly behind the first to cover the tail end of the previous bead. Use beads for borders at the edges on top of the cake and on the sides at the bottom of the cake.
For a lily of the valley flower, pipe curving stems and place five beads spaced evenly on the stem. For a forget-me-not flower, intersperse lines for curved stems and leaves with a cluster of five small beads circled around one center bead.
Edible Toppings
Place clusters of flowers anywhere on the cake.
Sprinkling edible toppings over the top or the sides of the cake takes just a minute. Use colored sugar sprinkles, shredded coconut, nut pieces, fruit, crushed candy canes or any small candies such as gumdrops. You can also use larger edible elements, such as lollipops, animal crackers or strips of chocolate. For chocolate strips or pieces, melt any chocolate and spread it out on wax paper to dry. Break the sheets of chocolate into various sized pieces to lie randomly over the top of the cake and sprinkle with cocoa powder or powdered sugar as a finish or cut the chocolate into strips to lay out in decorative patterns.
Decorative Toppings
This cake has a Snow White scene with plastic figures.
Edible flowers that you are sure have never been sprayed with chemicals make a lovely and easy cake topping. Use pansies, roses or rose petals, nasturtiums or violets in a border pattern around the top of the cake, scattered all over the cake or centered in the middle of the cake. Small toy trinkets such as sugar or plastic bunnies or rabbits for a springtime cake or witches and black cats at Halloween all work well, too.
Tags: over cake, beads borders, chocolate into, lily valley, lily valley flower