Creating Wedding Cake Decorations: A Step-By-Step Guide

Decorating a wedding cake can be a fun but challenging task. Here are some tips and ideas to help you create a beautiful and elegant wedding cake.

Planning and Preparation:

- Choose a cake flavour that will please a variety of guests. Vanilla, carrot cake, red velvet, lemon, and chocolate chip are popular options.

- Ensure you have the right tools and equipment, such as cake pans, parchment paper, a mixer, piping bags, and tips.

- Make enough frosting, and consider making extra to allow for mistakes and decorative piping. Buttercream, cream cheese frosting, and Swiss meringue buttercream are good choices for beginners.

- Plan the design and visualise your cake before you start decorating.

Assembly and Decoration:

- Use a cake leveler or a serrated knife to level the cakes and create a flat surface.

- Apply a crumb coat, a thin layer of frosting, to the cake to hold in crumbs and create a smooth surface for the final layer of frosting.

- Refrigerate the cake after the crumb coat to help it set.

- Use a variety of decorating techniques such as piping, fresh or sugar flowers, fruit, dried grasses, gold leaf, ruffles, or geometric designs.

- Consider adding personal touches like the couple's names or initials.

- For a rustic look, try a naked cake style with minimal frosting.

Using flowers, either fresh or sugar flowers

Flowers are a classic and elegant way to decorate a wedding cake. Whether you use fresh or sugar flowers, they will elevate the look of your cake to a whole new level.

Fresh Flowers

When using fresh flowers, it is important to choose your flowers carefully. Make sure any flowers you use have not been exposed to pesticides or harmful chemicals, and are not toxic or poisonous. Carnations, mums, roses, and spray roses are all good choices as they are non-toxic and readily available. If you are using herbs as greenery, thyme, rosemary, and bay leaves are all safe options that will add a delicate touch to your cake.

To attach the flowers to the cake, you can wrap the stems in floral tape and insert them directly into the cake, or use bubble tea straws to secure the flowers at an angle or on the sides of the cake. Another option is to use toothpicks, cutting the stem off the flower at the base of the bloom and inserting a toothpick in its place. This method leaves a smaller hole in the cake and ensures that no part of the flower touches it.

Sugar Flowers

Sugar paste flowers can be a lot of work, but they are a true art form and can look incredibly realistic. If you want to decorate your cake with sugar flowers, consider purchasing them pre-made or ordering them from a professional cake decorator. You can also try making them yourself using sugar paste, wafer paper, or fondant.

Adding intricate piping

Intricate piping is a challenging but beautiful way to decorate a wedding cake. It is an art form that requires practice, but there are some techniques to help beginners create a beautiful lace effect on wedding cakes quite easily.

Cornelli Piping/Filigree Piping

This technique involves using a piping bag with medium-consistency royal icing and a No.1 or No.2 icing tip or nozzle. Pipe a continuous "squiggly" line without crossing over the lines.

Scroll Piping

Scroll piping is a little more challenging than pearl piping or drop string piping but can be mastered with practice. It can be used to create a heavier or delicate lace effect depending on the pressure applied when piping. The more pressure used, the fatter and more "stand-out" the scroll design will be.

Basic Piping Techniques

When using a piping bag, it is important to hold the bag securely by twisting the end of the bag and keeping the icing locked into the front. Guide the bag with your other hand to keep it steady. Maintaining consistent pressure is key to achieving excellent piping technique. Release the pressure completely when finishing a shape. It is also important to ensure that the frosting is the correct consistency for piping; for smaller tips, a fairly soft/thin icing is required.

Piping Borders

A simple way to use a piping tip is to pipe borders around the base and/or tops of each tier. Hold the pastry bag at a 45-degree angle and apply gentle pressure to let the icing flow. When you've made the desired shape, stop applying pressure and move the bag to the next spot. A plain open tip can be used to make little dots or pearls, while a star tip can be used to make a "shell" or "rosette" border.

Randomness

For a more relaxed approach, you can fill several bags with different-sized tips and randomly pipe shapes in different colours wherever you like, leaving space around them. Then, fill in the spaces with the next colour and tip size. This method will result in a cool, unique design.

Using fruit as a decoration

One idea is to keep things simple with a sprinkling of berries. You could opt for a single type of berry, such as blackberries, or go for a mix of strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries. Another option is to get creative with painted, shimmering pears or apples. You could also try something tropical, like a mango slice wedding cake or a pineapple upside-down wedding cake.

If you're looking for a more elegant option, consider a peach and pear wedding cake. This design was influenced by Cezanne's "The Basket of Apples" and featured marzipan peaches and pears filled with nuts, dates, and figs. For a fun and colourful option, you could create a berry-covered masterpiece, adding a touch of gold fleck detailing and even macarons.

When decorating with fruit, it's important to be generous. These cakes look best with plenty of fruit piled high! And if you're worried about the fruit going bad, choose fruits with a longer shelf life, such as apples or pears.

Creating a crumb coat

A crumb coat is a thin layer of frosting spread around the entire surface of the cake, locking in any loose crumbs and keeping your outer shell of frosting perfectly smooth. It is a crucial step in creating a professional-looking cake.

To crumb coat your cake without getting any crumbs in your batch of frosting, start by adding about one cup of frosting to a small bowl. Place your filled and stacked cake on a turntable.

Start by frosting a thin layer of frosting on the top of your cake and smoothing it down with an angled spatula. Next, add a thin layer of frosting all around the sides of the cake and use an icing smoother to get the sides smooth and level. Hold the icing smoother at a 45-degree angle towards you while you rotate the turntable and scrape off the excess onto the edge of your bowl. Be sure to fill in any patchy areas with more buttercream and repeat the process of smoothing and scraping until you’ve got a thin, yet level crumb coat.

You’ll notice that a frosting “crown” has formed around the top edges of your cake, which is what you want to see. Using a clean angled spatula, swipe those edges toward the centre of the cake to create sharp edges all around the top.

When your cake is looking level and covered in a nice, thin crumb coat, pop the whole thing (turntable and all) into the refrigerator to chill for at least 30 minutes. Chilling your cake will make the buttercream firm, essentially gluing down any crumbs within the crumb coat and creating a stable foundation for your next layer of frosting.

After refrigerating for at least 30 minutes, you’re ready to move on to your final layer of frosting. If you’re short on time, it’s perfectly fine to refrigerate a crumb-coated cake overnight. Even though the crumb coat layer of buttercream is thin, it helps preserve the cake layers beneath and keep everything moist and fresh.

You can use any type of frosting for crumb coating your cake – basically whatever you’re planning on using for your final layer of frosting. If you need some recommendations, a basic vanilla buttercream is the perfect consistency for both crumb coating your cake and adding your final layer of frosting.

Adding a ganache drip

Ingredients:

• A levelled and frosted cake. It is best to level your cake before frosting and assembling, and chill the cake before adding the ganache drip.
• Chocolate: Use semisweet, bittersweet, or dark chocolate. You can use a chopped chocolate bar or chocolate chips.
• Cream: Heavy cream, double cream, or whipping cream will work.

Instructions:

• Chill the cake: Place the cake, uncovered, in the refrigerator so the frosting can harden a bit.
• Prepare the ganache: Place the chopped chocolate in a medium-sized heatproof bowl. Pour the cream into a saucepan and bring it to a simmer, then immediately pour it over the chocolate. Cover with foil and let it sit undisturbed for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, remove the foil and gently stir until the chocolate is completely melted and the mixture is smooth. Allow the ganache to cool for 15 minutes before pouring it into a squeeze bottle.
• Test the ganache: Before decorating your cake, test whether your ganache is ready to drip. Drop a small bead of ganache on a paper plate and immediately hold the plate vertically to allow the chocolate to drip down. If the chocolate runs too fast or runs off the plate completely, it is still too warm and needs to cool further.
• Drizzle the ganache: Hold the squeeze bottle vertically and squeeze a single bead of ganache on the very edge of the top of the cake. Allow the bead to drizzle over the edge and begin to drip down the side of the cake. Pause and assess the drip: if the ganache is too thin and runs all the way to the bottom of the cake, let it cool longer. If you squeezed out too much chocolate, simply squeeze less next time. If the ganache didn't drip as far as you wanted, squeeze a bit more.
• Continue dripping: Draw a line along the top of the cake to the next point where you want the next drip to be, typically only a few centimetres away. Repeat the previous step, squeezing another bead of ganache over the edge of the top of the cake. Continue going around the edge, varying the length of the drips as desired.
• Fill in the top: Once you have dripped ganache all the way around the cake, drizzle a thin layer of ganache over the surface of the cake. Use an offset spatula to spread it evenly.
• Chill the cake: Return the cake to the refrigerator for about 15-20 minutes to allow the ganache to set. If desired, top with swirls of frosting on top of the set ganache.

Frequently asked questions