Cake Decorating for Beginners Final Project

Written and Designed by Emily Hall

Supplies

Most of these things are cheap and easy to find in the store, usually close to the birthday supplies.

Frosting bags (more than one)

Frosting couplers (one per color/type of frosting)

Frosting tips

Buttercream frosting (for practicing buttercream is best, but you can do any stiff frosting. This will work with a small jar of frosting from the baking aisle)

Wax paper

Cupcakes and/or cake to decorate

A few hours of free time

Warning: you will get sticky. Frosting is sticky and no matter how careful you are, you will get frosting all over.

Cup ca kes are muffins that believedin miracl e s

Supplies

Beginning Steps

Cake decorating is always thought of as a difficult task, but once you learn a few simple practices, you can easily decorate cakes yourself. Is this book designed to make you a professional? Absolutely not. This book is here to give you a general overview of what types of things you can do with frosting that require a very small amount of skill.

These skills include things you can use to create beautiful but simple borders on cakes that can make you look like a professional.

Cake Decorating for Beginners

These are the types of tips you want to have onhand for what you’ll learn in this book. I recommend going with the wilton brand, but any brand works as long as you get these general shapes. For the coupler, you want a general size. Don’t buy a large coupler or one of the fancier ones with sections. You just need a basic cou pler.

For the open star tip I used Wilton tip #21. It doesnt matter how many points it has, you will get the same basic idea. Just make sure it looks similar.

Round tips: For the large one I used Wilton tip #12, and the small was Wilton tip #5.

coupler open star tip

round tip (1 large 1 small)

Practice

When learning how to use a piping bag, you want to use a coupler. This will allow you to change frosting tips without having to fill multiple bags. You should insert the coupler into the piping bag and bring it to the tip of the bag, ensuring the smaller side is towards the tip. Once you have the right position, you want to push it in tightly so the bag is snug against the coupler. After you have that taken care of, you can grab a pair of scissors and use the sharp edge to cut around the edge of the coupler, at about the area shown. If you go further up you run the risk of the cou pler falling out of the bag, which will really put a damper on your practicing.

This can take a few tries before you can really get the hang of it, so don’t get discouraged.

Cake Decorating for Beginners

First of all, you need to use a frosting that has structure. If it’s too soft/ runny, you will just spill frosting everywhere and it won’t hold its shape. Using a buttercream or any other type of stiffer frosting will help you.

The easiest way to fill a piping bag is to flip the top edge around your fingers and use your fingers with the bag to scrape the frosting off the spoon into the bag. Another easy trick is to use a cup with the same method. Don’t overfill the bag. Around 2/3 of the bag is probably the maximum you should do. Once you’ve put the frosting in, you want to twist the bag just above where the frosting is and then use your thumb and pointer finger to pinch the bag together. You will use your other 3 fingers to push the frosting out.

One of the most important parts to cake decorating is how you hold the frosting bag. After twisting just above the frosting, Your thumb and pointer finger in your dominant hand should pinch together the area of the twist to keep it secure. Then your 4 fingers serve as the pressure givers to have the frosting come out. How quick or how slow depends on how hard you push.

Ifyou eat an entire cake without cutting it , you technically only had one piece.

Stars and Rosettes

Before we start on learning some techniques, I want you to prac tice holding and using the piping bag. You can do this on some wax paper, and reuse the frosting.

Cake Decorating for Beginners

Helpful Hint: sometimes your frosting bag will have air bubbles that come at the most inconvenient moments. It happens to the best of us. Use that time to practice being able to cover it up. While you can scrape it off a practice board, you can’t always scrape it off a cake. If you can get good at covering up mistakes, it’s likely most people won’t even know you messed up.

First, using an open star tip, I’d like you to try to make small “stars” on your wax paper. You can do this by holding the bag straight up and down, not changing the way you hold it, and putting it close to the paper. Give a small squeeze, then as you stop the pressure, lift the bag up. It will take a few tries to know what to do and when. Your stars should start looking like the ones shown.

Stars and Rosettes

Cake Decorating for Beginners

Once you’ve got the hang of stars, you should move on to “ro settes’’, which is just a fancy way of saying a swirl. (if you add a leaf it can look like a simple flower). You still want your open star tip for this one. The best way to do this is to do a swirl, starting from the center, gradually moving out. Now, it’s a very small swirl, only really making you move in about one circle. When you get towards the end of it, you want to stop applying pressure (don’t pull away from the swirl too soon or you’ll have frosting sticking out). You want to follow the curve still and then gradually lose pressure. Don’t worry if your first one isn’t perfect. It won’t be.

A fun border you can do with this rosette is just a bunch of them together, or you can continue swirling over the other around the edge. You use the same motion as the rosette, but simply continue the swirl through each rosette.

This motion of the rosette can be applied with the large round tip. it is best used to make the rounded things you pipe (for example an eye) actually look round. if you pull away without doing that motion, it can leave you with pointed eyes, which isn’t necessarily bad. it looks much better if you do a quick swirl at the end.

Shells and Braids

Shells are a great thing to use for borders on cakes, and the gener al practice of shells can lead you to be able to pipe balloons, ghosts, pop flowers, and so much more. For shells you can use either a large round tip or an open star tip, depending on what you prefer. Typically when used for a border, you want the star tip because flaws are much less visible.

To pipe a shell, you need to do something similar to the star, except you drag the point to the side and down. One of the most important parts of the shell is the angle at which you do it. 45 degrees is general ly a good angle to do. In my opinion, it is one of the harder things to do in cake decorating.

Cake Decorating for Beginners

The pictures below show an example of the round tip at work. While the technique is exactly the same, the loo is completely different. But as I’ve shown below, you can use it to make all sorts of fun things, such as balloons.

To make a baloon you pipe a single shell (to make it bigger, just push harder and go slower in your motion). Then, you need a small round tip to create the string for the ballon. You can also use a small round tip to add a white shine on the ballon with an extended small shell following the curve. You can practice that without havig other colors of frosting.

Shells and Braids

A simple technique that wows many people is the braid border. Before you know its secrets, it seems impossible. Once you start how ever, it becomes easy. Its similar to the shells, but you can’t overthink it. You need tomake shell type motions at alternating angles, making sure to extend them further than typical shells. Then, after your first one, alternate the angle and then pipe your second shell overlapping the other. repeat this until you get something that looks like this.

Cake Decorating for Beginners

Whatever frostsyourcupca ke...

Writing

This is one of the things people find most daunting, but its very sim ple once you know how to pipe frosting in general. You’re writing, just in a different way. The best way to learn this is through practice. You want to use the motion of your whole arm, or even your whole body to write on a cake. Theres not much to teach as far as writing, because every cake decorator does it their own way.

One tip that can help when you are ust begginning is to have the frosting bag relatively low on frosting. You need frostin in there, but the lower it is, the lower your grip, which results in more control. This is good for practice, and once you get more comfortable you can go further up on your grip (with more frosting of course).

Writing

Going Forward

Congratulations!!! Youre now ready to decorate cakes in simple but elegant ways that can impress your friends and family. Now, what I recommend to you is to use resources online and offline to get better and better, and to learn more. Practicing and seeing what other things you can do can help you learn so much more too. Now you can think twice before paying $20+ on a cake you could’ve made yourself.

Cake Decorating for Beginners

One last thing you can add to your skills is leafs. You can use a tip like this one below, or even cut the edge of the piping bag in the same way it looks. The motion is the same as shells but you dont want to drag it down. You also shouldn’t drag it up unless thats what you’re go ing for. You should drag it outwards. These take some intense practice as well, but can be used to make simple rosettes look like little flowers.

Going Forward

Cake Decorating for Beginners

Now go change the world, one cake at a time!

Thanksfor comingto my TED talk

Learn some of the basics of cake decorating from someone who worked as a grocery store cake spe cialist. You may not become a pro from this book, but you’ll be able to use the few skills taught in this book to impress your friends and family.

“If eating cake is wrong, I don’t want to be right.”

- Lorelai Gilmore : Gilmore Girls