Cake Decorating Fundamentals

Cake decorating is one of the sugar arts that uses icing or frosting and other edible decorative elements to make otherwise plain cakes more visually interesting. Alternatively, cakes can be molded and sculpted to resemble three-dimensional persons, places and things.
In many areas of the world, decorated cakes are often a focal point of a special celebration such as a birthday, graduation, bridal shower, wedding, or anniversary.

Have you ever looked at a particularly fancy cakeand thought, how do they do that? The artist probably spent years perfecting the art of cake decorating in order to create that cake. Some Sugar craft artists will sell their designs; some will teach classes and teach students how to make their “signature” cakes and some will guard their techniques like a national security secret.

Cakes are a unique food product because cakes can be cooked, molded, shaped, and decorated to look like just about anything imaginable. Pastry chefs, wedding cake designers, and other Sugarcraft artists spend years, sometimes their entire lifetimes, perfecting new methods of decorating cakes and creating new and unique designs for cakes.