Icing a fantastic cake no longer requires spending fiddly hours constructing tiny icing roses. These ideas are fast, simple and snazzy!
Fifty years ago a stunning wedding cake required countless hours of labour, visible in the final product as lacework, extension-work, hand-tinted flowers with each petal crafted individually, and an exhausted mother of the bride in the background! Fortunately for today's DIY-inclined bride, contemporary cake decoration trends are for the funky, chunky and non-edible. Here's how to produce a stunning cake with the minimum of talent:
Ribbons
The human eye is drawn to borders, so any slightly uneven bottom edge of fondant makes a cake look unprofessional. Hide the evidence by pinning a wide ribbon around the bottom of each tier in the wedding colours. Flat bows can jazz up the ribbons, or they can be left plain as long as the join is at the back of the cake.
Real or Flax Flowers
Ask the wedding florist to make a cake topper. Fresh flowers are gorgeous, and far less time-consuming to arrange than icing flowers. Another alternative is to use flax flowers for a contemporary look. Flax flowers can be kept afterwards by the bride as an heirloom, and can be dyed to match the wedding theme.
Shapes on Wires
Boinging red hearts on springs or delicate butterflies hovering above the cake on gold wires are a very popular, funky look. Buy the wires from a cake decorating shop, along with a cutter in the shape you like. You can even buy flower paste icing pre-tinted, or mix the colour yourself. Simply roll out the icing, cut it, poke the wires into the shapes and leave to dry. Then the wires can be bent, crimped or coiled, and poked into the top of the highest tier of the cake. As an added bonus, the shapes or wires can make cute wedding favors.
Cutouts
The shapes don't need to be on wires, of course! A dab of royal icing will secure them to the top or sides of a cake. Buy cutters in graduated sizes and have a cascade of hearts down the sides of the cake, or dot shapes at random over the entire cake.
A Hint of Colour
Powder-based icing colours give very delicate tints when brushed over a surface. These powders are available in pearlescent and metallic colours. A faint dusting of antique gold over a dark chocolate cake, or a hint of silver on a winter wedding cake, can give a professional and luxurious feel. Cutouts or shapes on wires can also be delicately tinted, perhaps around the edges, for a feminine fairytale effect.
