How to: Cake Templates

Fondant and I have a love-hate relationship. I love the decorations you can make with it, but I hate the taste.

But I've found that there are so many awesome ways to decorate a cake with buttercream (other than a traditional piped border). If you passed tracing in kindergarden I'm pretty positive you can perfect this method.

Before I show you the tutorial I have to make it known, that I am a huge FSU fan, and it PAINED me to make this Gator cake. In fact, my dad might've killed me for it. But what are you going to do when your friend cheers for your rival and you're celebrating his birthday.

Moving on..

1. Start with a cake that's been iced and chilled in the fridge for about 15 minutes. You want the icing to hard so you can work with it.

2. Choose your image.
You can freehand draw what you want on a piece of paper (like what I did here), or just print one out. Just know that you'll really only be able to trace the border, so start out with something simpler if you're not entirely confident in your drawing capabilities.


3. Cut out around the image

Here I've cut into the teeth so I know where to follow the mouth line

4. Lay the image on top of your chilled cake and trace around the edges with a toothpick.

5. Take a piping bag with either Wilton Tip 2 or Tip 3 (any brand is interchangeable,  I am just familiar with Wilton tips), and pipe around the traced border.
*Tip about piping: you want to you a steady pressure or else you'll have breaks in the icing. Practice on a piece of parchment paper to get the hang of it.

6. Using a star tip, fill the image in.
Do this by starting in a corner, hold the tip just above the cake (so that its practically touching). Giving a one to two second squeeze, pull the piping bag up in an upward motion. Keep doing this until the image is filled.
If they're are 'holes' in the filling simply take the piping bag and fill them in.

Keep repeating with however many image you want to create on the cake.

Here are some cakes I've made using this method