How to Decorate a Wedding Cake

Transcript So you want to arrange real flowers on your wedding cake. It’s definitely a lot less expensive than using gum paste flowers. There are a few caveats. You don’t want to use heavily sprayed flowers. You want to go through a respectable florist who’s going to tell you the truth if these are organic. …

Transcript So here we have a crumb coated cake and I’m going to show you how to make a swirl design over your cake with butter cream frosting. What I have in here is a Swiss meringue butter cream with a little bit of pink march throughout, and what we’re going to get is kind …

Transcript A really fun thing to do with your cake is to decorate using candy. What I have here today is a very nostalgic wafer candy. What I’m going to do is create a border around the bottom of both of my tiers, doing a little tile pattern. The first thing you want to do …

Transcript Another great finishing touch to your wedding cake is a fondant ribbon and bow. So what I have here is some very pink fondant. Take it out of its protective bag. This is tylose powder and what that is it’s kind of a gummy chemical that we’re going to add to this. It is …

Transcript Alright, so we’ve got our cakes baked, we’ve got our tier boards cut, and we have some delicious Swiss butter cream ready to go. So now we’re gonna go ahead and fill our cake tier. First thing I’m gonna do is take some wet paper towel and put it in the middle of my …

Transcript Today we want to make a polka dot pattern on our wedding cake and we’re going to be using gum paste. You could also use fondant, but gum paste has more gummy chemicals that are in it, so when you mix it together it starts to become more rubbery, more elastic and stick together. …

Transcript A really fun element to add to your wedding cake is disco dust, which is an edible glitter product. What could be wrong with that? Absolutely nothing. So you can see it’s super, super shimmery, really, really shiny. A caveat, when you use this you will be wearing it the rest of the day, …

Transcript So now it’s time to cut and enjoy the cake. The first thing we’ll do is take off our anniversary tier to wrap up and preserve later. I’m just going to put this on the plate here. I’m going to gingerly slide a knife between the two tiers. They should be fairly stuck together …

Transcript A really great way to finish off your cake is with some fun wedding cake embellishments. What I have here are some clay tools. They’re actually– you can fill them in, little cavities, that you can get a great, really highly detailed finish to add to your cake. So what I’m going to do …

Transcript So now we’re going to add some Swiss dot’s, a nice Swiss dot pattern to our cake here to dress it up a little bit. I have #1 tip, but you can use a #2 or #3. It’s the basic round tip. You see my Royal Icing bag has a coupler, so I can …

Transcript We want to make a base for our cake structure, and this is going to be a fondant board. This is a plain, store-bought, really strong, nice, thick board. They’re very, very common. I think they’re a little tacky. If you’re doing a wedding cake, it’s like everybody and their brother can buy one …

Transcript A really quick way to make your cake look finished is to hide the seams. The seam is here, you can see where it’s 2 cakes put together, but we want it to look like one giant piece. I’m going to use a rose tip here, which is usually number 104. I’ve got some …

Transcript Hi. My name is Michelle Doll, and I’m a cake designer. I’m actually a career changer. I spent ten years in the graphic design industry, working in corporate identity development, and while that was great, it’s not what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I went to the French Culinary Institute …

Transcript So this is how you do a striped design on a wedding cake. I’m going to use gum paste again, because it’s got the elasticity that I want, and because the stripes that you make tend to be really, really long. And if you do that in fondant and you pick it up the …

Transcript So you’ve had a successful wedding and now you’re ready to save your anniversary tier. What your caterer is going to do for you is chill that top layer. You want it to be really nice, cool, and firm to the touch before you attempt to wrap it up to be saved. Traditionally, you …

Transcript We are going to add a clamshell border to our swirl design cake here. I’m using a chocolate Swiss meringue with a smaller star tip. This one is actually number 32. It’s going to give us a nice ridged pattern as we go around. The trick is to let the butter cream build up, …

Transcript Now we are going to assemble a wedding cake. This is one of the most difficult parts of putting together a wedding cake, and it’s also one of the most important. If you do everything 100% right, but you don’t get this part right, nothing else matters. Nothing is worse than being worried that …

Transcript So, this pink is pretty aggressively pink. I’d love to give it a little bit of a metallic finish, to blend in with the rest of the cake, it will make it look really nice and finished. What I’m using is an airbrushed color, it’s actually the Pearl Sheen. You mix it up really, …

Transcript So we want to paint with gold our embellishments on the cake. It’s going to make them really pop, give a really nice, sophisticated air to the cake. I’m using some vodka. The reason you want to use alcohol and not water is because alcohol evaporates really, really quickly. So we can make a …

Transcript Alright, so now we want to fondant our cake. We’ve got a beautiful, chilled cake that’s been perfectly crumb coated. It’s ready to go. I have some fondant paste here. And what fondant paste basically is is a gelatin and powdered sugar mixture, and it should feel like Play-Doh. So, once you get it …

Transcript So, how do you talk to your cake designer or maker? It’s a little tricky. Cakes are usually booked 6 months in advance. So, if you’re calling them a year and a half in advance, they’re going to have a hard time wrapping their head around the exact date. If you call them a …

Transcript One of the most important parts of putting together a wedding cake is having a strong foundation, and that means having tier boards beneath each tier of your wedding cake. Having those tier boards is going to enable you to put supports underneath so that each tier can be held up. If you ever …