Tips &Tricks for decorating desserts

Tips &Tricks for decorating desserts

So you’ve prepared everything, put in so much effort and love and finally managed to bake that beautiful cake just like your grandma used to bake. It looks and smells divine, its taste must be just as you remember it from your childhood. However, before you take it out to your family and guests (or even if you were just baking it for yourself) you should take some time and decorate it so it will look even more delicious covered with cream, chocolate or lollies. Here are a few tricks to help you in your cake decorating adventures.

Piping Tips

Classic frosting rosettes and basket weaving may look like advanced techniques, but they’re actually easy to do. Make sure your icing is stiff enough for piping otherwise your leaves, rosettes or basket weave design will collapse. Try a practice rosette and watch if the detail disappears and becomes smooth. When piping ruffles as a border at the bottom of a cake you should ensure the heavy part of the design is against the cake to hide it. The “ruffle” will be on the outside.

Fondant tips

Commercial fondant can be less elastic than homemade. Try to add some tragacanth gum to the fondant to make it more elastic and less likely to tear when rolling or shaping designs. Store cut outs in a sealed container or wrapped in plastic until you need them or they might dry out and look less attractive. No matter how careful you are when you are covering a cake with fondant, little air pockets can appear. To remove them from cake covering, use a pin to prick the pocket and then gently smooth the air out using a fondant smoother. This is similar to removing air bubbles from wallpaper and not at all complicated.

Play with ingredients

There is much more to decorating than simple fondant and icing. Use your imagination and play with colours, textures and ingredients when decorating your cakes. There are so many things which you can use: fresh or dried fruit pieces arranged into shapes such as flowers or animals, for example. All sorts of candies such as lollies, toffees or pieces of chocolate can make excellent cake designs. Coconut (shredded or desiccated) can be easily coloured using food colouring and then easily sprinkled all over the cake to form different shapes and designs (flags have never been easier to ‘draw’!). You can use cookies as imaginative wheels on a car and ice-cream cones to build a castle.

However, pieces of advice before you start: always practice your design element before trying it on the cake to ensure the flow and texture of the icing is perfect. Remember that cake decorating can take a long time and even if you spend a lot of time learning the techniques and patterns, there will always be something new out there. Do not worry yourself with difficult tasks and patterns, let your imagination flow and love what you do. Everything else is fixable and less important.

Video provided by Big Lolly