Easy Cake Decorating Ideas

A lot of people seem to put a lot of pressure on themselves when it comes to cake decorating. If their cake doesn’t look like something that came out of an episode of Cake Boss or Ace of Cakes, they feel disappointed. The thing is, the people you see on television are professionals and have spent many years and hundreds of hours perfecting their craft. If you try to hold yourself up to these standards, surely you’ll be disappointed!

However, even with a few simple skills you can decorate a cake that still looks impressive and professional. Feel free to leave the modeling chocolate, gumpaste, marzipan, and fondant aside for some other time. If you’re in a hurry or just don’t feel like tackling such a complicated project, simplicity can be your best friend. Here’s a few simple solutions you can use for fashioning simple cake decorations.

1. After frosting the entire cake, you can pipe a simple border all around the top edge and base of the cake with a simple bead border, using a small round tip, or with big puffs of swirled star frosting using Wilton tip #21. You can also frost the entire cake using the #789 cake icer tip. A nice thing about this tip is that it produces decorative striations which many people leave alone instead of smoothing them out.

2. Another option requires a bit more patience but is fairly brainless and doesn’t require much artistic skill. You’ll need to choose a decorative pattern that is also repetitive, such as dots, swirls, diamonds, squiggles or any other geometric shape or pattern. Then take this shape or pattern and use it decoratre every square inch of your cake. You can use one color to keep things simple or many different colors. The most commonly used Wilton tips used for this purpose are #2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7.

3. If you don’t want to frost or decorate your cake with frosting you can think outside the box and use other toppings such as miniature marshmallows, chocolate chips, mints, or butterscotch morsels. You’ll usually need about 4 cups of mini marshmallows for a 9 x 13 cake or 2 cups of chips, candies, or morsels. I would melt them in a microwave until smooth and then spread over the cake. You’ll probably have to work pretty quickly.

4. Cookie cutters also work great for cake decorating. Instead of trying to draw freehand, use cookie cutters as outlines or to cut out shapes. Molded pans also make life easy because they can often hide flaws easier and sometimes all the require is a bit of powdered sugar sprinkled on top and you’re done.

Also, you can skip the whole cake idea altogether, and bake cupcakes which have become more popular these past few years. The great thing about cupcakes is that you don’t need to painstakingly frost each cupcake if that’s not your thing. You can simply dip and swirl them in thin icing and call it done!

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