Hot Cake Decorating How-Tos « Cake Decorating

How To: Make a sculpted dog cake

Elisa Strauss of Confetti Cakes sculpted her dad's labradoodle for his birthday. Learn how to make a labradoodle yourself.

How To: Make a fondant icing or gumpaste sofa chair

So, Dad's Birthday is coming up and you want to make him a specialized cake. "What are his interests?" you ask yourself. Watching football, baseball, Wheel of Fortune? Do all his hobbies include a sofa and a television perhaps? Then why not make him a cute living room cake!

How To: Make a person out of sugar paste or ready to use icing

A fun and simple project, you can make little figures of people out of sugar paste. This is a simple and tasty decorating tip to top your next cake or confection. All you need is a little food coloring and a few dabs of water.

How To: Make a fire truck birthday cake

In order to decorate A Fire Truck Birthday Cake, you will need the following: 3 chocolate cakes baked in loaf pans, Oreo type sandwich cookies, candies, and brightly colored icing.

How To: Make a chubby fondant panda for cake decorating

Okay, so how cute is this chubby fondant panda bear? While the ltitle dude makes an adorable cupcake or cake topper for your kid's birthday party, you should definitely also find excuses to pop it on top of your own baked creations - we're thinking for baby showers or for a spring bash.

How To: Decorate simple candy melt flower and heart cupcakes

If you know how to use your microwave then you can easily make these gorgeous Valentine's Day cupcakes. That's because all it takes is microwaving candy melts - and squeezing some flower and heart shapes - to adorn your baked goods.

How To: Make a psychedelic tie-dyed cake and cupcakes

Before this video we had no idea you could tye die cakes (sort of). While tie dying t-shirts, linens, and other wares requires several colors of fabric dye and scrunching up the fabric, tie dying cake involves no toxic chemicals.

How To: Cover a styrofoam dummy cake with fondant

Fondant as a cake decorating material is difficult to work with. Before we even get into how demanding it is to sculpt little fondant figures like giraffes and zebras, the issue of covering an entire cake with a rolled out piece of fondant should be covered.

How To: Make Homemade Vanilla Frosting from Scratch

This is a great quick and easy recipe and a great healthy alternative to store-bought frosting. My husband and children love this frosting, and it's also a hit at my PTA meetings. It goes great on cakes, cupcakes, cookies, or anything you desire to put frosting on.

How To: Cover a square shaped cake with fondant

Most cakes are round, so it's only natural that most cake decorating tutorials only focus on how to ice and apply fondant to round cakes. But sometimes you want to think outside of the box by decorating, ironically, a box-shaped cake instead.

How To: Make a VW beetle cake with buttercream

In this video, we learn how to make a VW beetle cake with buttercream. First, you will need to apply the buttercream icing onto the top of your cake and the sides. After this, you will pile on the other cakes to this with more icing inside of each layer. Then, you will start to cut the cake and it into the shape of the car that you want to make. Use an outline so you can follow it while you are making it so you know exactly how it is formed. Next, you will add in the parts for the wheels, the...

How To: Create your own piping cones out of cellophane

Piping cones are indispensible when applying flowers, leaves, and frilly trims on cupcakes and cakes, and cones with particularly fine points can be used to apply henna in intricate patterns.

How To: Make a topsy turvy cake

This video demonstrates how to make a topsy turvy cake. This is a very hard cake to make and requires some previous baking experience. He bakes a cake first and layers them using icing as a glue. He makes sure the cake is semi-frozen first before he starts carving it to be the base of the cake. After he is done carving, he covers the cake with icing. If you follow the rest of the steps in this video, you'll have a beautiful topsy turvy cake.

How To: Make poured sugar diamonds for cake decorating

Crafting diamonds out of sugar? Don't worry, it's not nearly as hard as turning lead into gold. At least the process is simple when we're talking about sugar diamonds.

How To: Make Ball Drop Cupcakes for New Year's Eve

The clock 'til countdown is ticking, but there's still some time left before the new year arrives. Try this last-minute recipe for New Year's Eve ball drop cupcakes from Confessions of a Cookbook Queen. They look pretty pro, but are actually quite simple to make. You Will Need:

How To: Make professional quality cake decorator's icing

The difference between professional cake decorator's icing and your run-of-the-mill canned icing from Pillsbury Doughboy - or simple homemade icing - is that the pro variety is much smoother, richer, and tastier without being too sweet.

How To: Make gumpaste cake decorations look like wood (faux bois)

Faux bois is a fancy schmancy French term for fake wood. And faux bois prints on furniture, pillows, as wallpaper, and even as ingrained barks of chocolate are all the rage right now.

How To: Assemble believable hair for gumpaste figures

If you want to make cakes that look professional and almost good enough to sell, then meet gumpaste, your new BFF. A mixture of sugar, water, egg white and gelatin, it's a sweet, pliable cake decorating material that's as easy to shape as polymer clay.

How To: Make a lifelike gumpaste petunia flower for cake decorating

Gumpaste is like the polymer clay of the cake decorating world: If you can imagine it, you can make it. Gumpaste is an excellent material, then, for crafting edible flowers for a wedding cake or a birthday cake.

How To: Turn decorated cookies into holiday ornaments and party favors

Got lots of pretty cookies to share with friends and family during the holidays? While it's true you could hand them off in tins as is, it's so much more fun to experiment with packaging and favor ideas.

How To: Stack a cake using pillars and dowel rods

Unless you're making a one layer cake, which doesn't seem to exist all that often anymore, putting together double, triple, and even quadruple layered cakes requires that skill we learned by trial in error when we were wee little toddlers playing with legos: stacking.

How To: Smooth American buttercream using a spatula

American buttercream, made from copious amounts of butter and powdered sugar, forms a particularly thin crust because of the high sugar content, which prevents sticking. American buttercream requires special methods to smooth it out so it lies even on top of a cake, so if you're working with it on your next cake project, check out this video to see how to smooth things out using a spatula.

How To: Mix gel-based food icing colors for cake decorating

Remember when you were five and you had a blue crayon and a yellow crayon but all you really wanted was a green crayon? Just as you would mix colors in coloring and any other artistic medium, you sometimes need to mix icing colors in cake decorating.

How To: Air dry flowers made from buttercream frosting to use as cake decorations

If you need to make lots of frosting flowers (such as for decorating a wedding cake), you can make many of the flowers ahead of time and then let them air dry before putting them on your cake. This video shows you how to make hydrangeas, gardenias, roses and Gerber daisies out of buttercream frosting.

How To: Color your fondant for cake decorating

Coloring your fondant is actually a very simple process. Like coloring water or your cookies, coloring fondant involves adding a few drops of food coloring and then blending, blending, blending.

How To: Use rubber stamps to pattern a fondant cake

This is what we'd call a hybrid craft if we've ever seen one. Using a rubber stamp on a cake does sound kind of strange (they usually go on paper, right?), but as long as these stamps are new and unused, they actually function really great for decorating on fondant.

How To: Frost a cupcake with a spatula for beginners

Please do us a favor and preserve your cupcake's modesty by dressing her nakedness up in a sweet parka of strawberry-flavored royal icing. While we're aware of the challenges that frosting a cupcake produces (we've had plenty of occasions when we've ended up with more frosting on ourselves than on the cupcakes), this video lays it out easily for anyone to follow.

How To: Cover a square dummy cake with rolled fondant

Fondant is quite the tricky cake decorating material. On the surface it looks smooth, slick, and solid, but the consistency of fondant is actually quite thin and the sugary paste is very liable to tearing while you're working with it.

How To: Decorate rubber ducky shaped cupcakes

Ernie from "Sesame Street" loved his rubber duckies. In fact, there was seldom a scene in his bathtub - or even outside of it - where he was seen without his beloved bright yellow rubber ducky. We think he may have even loved it more than he loved Bert (just kidding).

How To: Make a penguin cake topper out of fondant icing

Interested in making a tiny penguin topper for a Christmas-themed cake? This clip will show you precisely how to go about making one. It's easier than you'd think. So easy, in fact, that this free video cooking lesson can present a complete overview of the process in about ten minutes. For more information, including the full recipe, and to get started making your own Christmas cake penguin, watch this video guide.

How To: Make a Football-Shaped Pull-Apart Cake

What kind of cake goes best with the Super Bowl? If you guessed a football-shaped cake, you guessed right. In this video recipe, Betty Crocker shows you how to whip up a super easy American football cake that's also a pull-apart cake, because Super Bowl fans don't have time to slice and serve.

How To: Roll a smooth ball with sugar paste or fondant

In this tutorial, we learn how to roll a smooth ball with sugar paste or fondant. First, start off by crushing your fondant into pieces and turning it around with your hands, pushing it in firmly until it gets softer. Keep kneading until all the little hard pieces are pressed out and so are the imperfections. Rolling into a ball should be the easiest part, just don't over think it. It's not how you roll the ball, it's where on your hands you roll the ball of sugar paste. To finish, you want t...

How To: Decorate the perfect 50th anniversary cake

This cake is the perfect way to celebrate the love and commitment that is involved in fifty long years of marriage. A 50th anniversary is a huge event and only the most beautiful cake will do. In this clip, learn to make a cake from start to finish. Save all the money you would pay a bakery and add a personal touch to your celebration. Enjoy!

How To: Decorate a perfect soccer field/football pitch cake

In this video, learn how to decorate a cake that looks like a perfect soccer field. This is a great way to celebrate the upcoming World Cup game and includes everything from grass to players to goal posts. This adorable little cake will make an impressive - and delicious - addition to any event!

How To: Make a kitty litter box cake with Maggie

Ever wonder what it'd be like to shove your face into your cat's litter box? Well, now you can try it! Okay, maybe this won't be EXACTLY like that.

How To: Make a pregnant belly fondant cake

Unfortunately, baby showers tend to celebrate the baby, not the mom who's gone through morning sickness, nine months of gestation, and, soon, the most game-changing and painful experience of her life.

How To: Make a caterpillar cake and bug cupcake

In this video, we learn how to make a caterpillar cake and bug cupcakes with Lee Hanson. You will need: 1 box Betty Crocker cake mix, any ingredients the box calls for, 8 drops of green food color, 1 1/2 container of Betty Crocker vanilla frosting, tray covered with foil, 5 candy-coated chocolate candies, 2 vanilla wafers, 2 small pretzel sticks and 24 gumdrops. First, heat your oven to 350 degrees and bake the cake. Let it cool for a few hours or until it's not warm at all. Then, cut the cak...

How To: Make a dinosaur birthday cake

Learn from Betty Crocker Kitchens, how to easily and quickly make a dinosaur birthday cake. You do not need a special cake pan for this recipe. She uses two 9" round cakes, to cut all the shapes you need to make the dinosaur. It is only required to cut out 3 shapes, and you can print the templates from their website. After the shapes are cut, you use the frosting to "glue" the cake to the platter you are working on and then spread a thin layer of the frosting all over the cake to seal in the ...

How To: Make a pull-apart football cupcakes

BettyCrockerTV shows viewers how to make pull-apart football cupcakes! First, you should cook cupcakes, and then arrange the cupcakes on the platter. Start with three rows of three cupcakes. Next add two on each side! Then add one on the end to finish this off. Now it should look like a football. Now to frost, you should not frost each cupcake. Instead, pipes frosting on to all of the cupcakes in the shape of a football. It should take 2 cups of frosting. Now, after piping frosting onto the c...

How To: Do ruffle & ruffle bow cake decorating techniques

Wilton Cake Decorating demonstrates how to do a ruffle and a ruffle bow cake decorating techniques. Use a #104 petal tip to create this effect. Also use a medium icing consistency and hold the bag at a 45 degree angle. A petal tip can be used to make ribbons and bows. The icing tip has a narrow end and a larger end. Place the larger end down and move your hand up and down to create the ribbon. Make a figure eight to make the bow. Add a knot in the middle, if desired, and add strings. Star tip...