Festive Cake Decorating with We bake

webake christmas cakes

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I had the pleasure of learning some very handy cake decorating skills at a recent baking lesson with We Bake with Juliet Sear.

How to make edible Christmas Baubles

Edible Christmas Baubles
Edible Christmas Baubles

Juliet Sear taught us how to make our own edible Christmas baubles using royal icing, some festive cutters and glittery spray. All of these cake decorating ingredients can be bought, ready to use. The icing comes in ready to use packs and in many different colours. Little squezy tubes of icing is so handy for making those decorative swirls. The icing pack comes with several difference nozel shapes too, all ready for you to unleash your creativity.

In the short few minutes that we were allocated, everyone in the class came up with a different design and lots of different colour combinations. Look at these baubles.

Step 1 - wrap cake in rmarzipan, ready for further decorations
Step 1 – wrap cake in rmarzipan, ready for further decorations

Step 1 – We made the baubles by firstly cutting out a piece of fruit cake. You need quite a dense cake that will stay in shape. Firstly, wrap the cake in a layer of shop bought marzipan. Roll it to smooth the layers and to make round shape.

Step 2 -Then you wrap it in your desired colour of royal icing. Take the icing out of the packaging and roll it out to the right size. Not too thin as it will split. After you wrap the icing around the ball of cake, roll it around in hands a bit to smooth out the seams.

Step 3 - cut out shapes with more royal icing
Step 3 – cut out shapes with more royal icing

Step 3- When that is done, you can start to get creative. Cut out some shapes with the cutters and you can stick them on with a bit of icing. Use the squeezy tubes to draw other shapes and designs.

Bauble decorated with Dr Oetker icing in a tube
Bauble decorated with Dr Oetker icing in a tube and some glitter gel which didn’t sit well on the royal icing

Step 4 – You can finish it off with some glittery spray in gold or silver. The aerosol gold spray is such a brilliant product. Other food bloggers have used this on their regular food photos too as it makes the images shine.

Red edible Christmas Bauble with cut out Christmas trees, finished with gold spray
Red edible Christmas Bauble with cut out Christmas trees, finished with gold spray

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How to decorate a Christmas Cake (Easy)

Christmas Cake Decorating
Close up of the icing and decorations

For this project, we decorated a festive Christmas cake. The cake base was already baked for us. You can use any cake recipe and here we had a brownie like cake recipe which is a bit firmer than a sponge cake. You will need at least 2 tiers. You will need a revolving cake decorating base to help you with this. You can work without one but it helps.

Place the first tier on a cake board on top of the cake decorating base.

Firstly, sandwich the cakes with a generous slather of the chocolate butter cream with a long palette knife. You can make your own or use the ready made tubs. Then add a generous layer of icing around the sides. You can make it smooth the edges by turning the cake around the stationary knife.

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We kept our icing slightly textured, depending on the look you are going for. Then cover the top last. This way, you can hold the cake from the top while you work. After you have smoothed over the butter icing on the top, you can use a tub of the chocolate dripping icing to create the ever so trendy designer drip. This is the newest trend to ice cakes.

The icing we used was lightly warmed through to make it runny and you just pour this on the edge of the cake, freehand. There are different coloured icing drips available or you can add colouring to a plain icing.

Work your way around the top of the cake creating a dripping pattern all over the edges. This will set quite quickly.

To decorate the top of the cake, we had a selection of fruit, sprinkles, glitter spray and chocolate shards to use. Since it is Christmas, more is more.

I chose to pile on chocolate dipped strawberries, shards of chocolate bark and some currants sprayed with the gold glitter. The final result didn’t look too messy, but don’t look too closely.

This was really fun. As it is not a very precise iced cake decorating, there is no right or wrong way to do it. The freeform cake decorating is very forgiving. Just pile it all on and adjust until it pleases the eye.

Cake decorating step 1 - sandwich the cake tiers with butter cream
Cake decorating step 1 – sandwich the cake tiers with butter cream
Cake decorating step 2 - After coating the sides of the cake with butter cream, cover the top evenly with butter cream
Cake decorating step 2 – After coating the sides of the cake with butter cream, cover the top evenly with butter cream
Christmas Cake decorating - the final product
Christmas Cake decorating – the final product

 

Christmas Cake decorated with chocolate shards, chocolate dipped strawberries and red currants
Christmas Cake decorated with chocolate shards, chocolate dipped strawberries and red currants

I’ve not had the chance to do much cake decorating before but now that I have had a bit more experience with it and know that all these easy to use ingredients are at hand, I am going to be doing more of that. It is a great creative outlet.

Have a go yourself. What will you try first?

If you like baking, you can share your creations here and find lots of other enthusiastic bakers. You can join We Bake here.

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