Some simple tips and inspiration to decorate your own beautiful Easter Cake.

Hey Spring, I’m Ready Whenever You Are…

Today is the first day of April which hopefully means we are in the month where spring fiiiinally arrives! The ground is currently covered in snow BUT last year we had our worst ice storm of the year in on April 15 so this is not out of the ordinary. This week’s forecast looks downright glorious so I’m counting us lucky despite yesterday’s snowy set back. I’m already on daffodil watch and the amount of spring projects I’ve planned outnumbers the amount of spring days. Needless to say, it’s an exciting time of year!

Last week Allison, who does flowers with me and also makes beautiful cakes on the side, helped me make this Easter cake. Ie. Allison completely made the cake and I just came in for my favourite part…decorating!

Seriously, wouldn’t this cake be perfect for any spring celebration?!

For Valentine’s Day this year Allison and I made a beautiful naked cake. With spring gracing us soon I felt that some spring dessert inspiration was in order with this Easter cake!

First Things First…All of Our Cake Decorating Tips & Secrets!

Allison started with a classic box cake mix and made 4 cakes in 8″ pans. When making a layered cake, cut the top of the cake flat using a cake cutting wire or a sharp knife. This will allow your cakes to sit flat on top of each other and eliminate the top hump that forms when baking. With this Easter cake we opted for full coverage with the icing as opposed to a naked cake look but the two styles are achieved in the same manner – with a naked cake you just scrape off more icing!

In our Valentine’s Day Cake post I shared some of my best takeaways on how to make the perfect cake. I’m sharing those again here. This next little bundle of information is *almost* verbatim from our previous post but these are truly game changing tips if you are a newbie to cakes like I am!

TAKE YOUR TIME

This was the biggest lesson for me. In the past when trying to make a layered cake I have not left myself enough time. In reality, making a cake is a 2 day job. Bake on the first day, decorate on the second.

KEEP YOUR CAKE COLD!

The really important thing when decorating cakes is to keep them COLD! This is the main reason why giving yourself enough time is so important. That day (yes, a DAY!) of chilling is important to make sure the icing holds firm between the layers and doesn’t melt between the two.

CONSISTENCY IS KEY

The icing was butter cream made with LOTS of icing sugar. Having a thick buttercream will ensure that your icing stays firm between the cake layers which is really important. A runny icing will not allow you to have nice layers in your cake (I’ve made this error before too!).

TOOLS HELP!

Allison used a lazy Susan to spin the cake while she smoothed the icing and this is definitely something I will be adding to my kitchen. An icing spatula is really helpful for smoothing the icing on your cake – it has a bit of flexibility which makes it far better than a knife. For this cake we used icing to make the details of the branches and the nest – to do this we used plastic icing bags which can be purchased at the grocery store, along with some pastry tips with a small opening for the detail work.

 

Easter Cake – Decorating the Cake and Making the Nest!

The fun design detail on this cake is the nest which was super simple to make. If you do not have time to bake your own cake, simply add decoration like this to a simple grocery store cake to take it to the next level.

1. Add cocoa powder to your icing mix to make it brown.
2. Add your brown icing to the piping bag. If you do not have a pastry tip then you can cut a very small hole in the tip of the bag to allow the icing to come out.
3. Decide on the shape of your nest and squeeze the icing slowly out of the piping bag and layer the icing around that shape multiple times until it has some dimension.
4. Fill your nest with chocolate eggs or mini eggs. We even used edible gold dust for on ours…a fun touch!
5. You have an adorable cake already! Want to take things further? Read on.

 

Adding Moss + Flowers

The really fun addition that Allison made was the edible ‘moss’. This is actually made using Pillsbury sugar cookies!

1. Mash up the cookie mix and add green food colouring
2. Bake as per instructions in irregular shapes.
3. Break up the cookies into smaller chunks for larger areas of moss or into crumbs for little leaf details

 

The final addition was some flowers. We used roses because they are edible and because spray roses give a nice variety of bloom sizes. To place flowers in the cake I cut the stem as close to the bloom as possible and inserted a toothpick into the flower stem which then could be placed wherever you want on the cake. Using a toothpick makes it so that you do not have to place any floral stems actually into your cake.

So there you have it…with just some brown icing, some cookie moss, some mini eggs and a few flowers you could make a similar fun Easter cake. Just perfect to welcome spring!

         

 

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