Decorating Cakes: Finishing Touches

By: Allrecipes Staff

From fresh flowers to sugar-frosted fruits, garnishes add a whole new dimension to your cakes. They can be used for added color, a contrasting texture, or to indicate the flavor of the cake or filling.

Flowers

Fresh edible flowers make gorgeous and easy decorations. You can start with a frosted cake or a plain cake lightly dusted with confectioners' sugar: pile on the flowers such as sweet violets, lavender, honeysuckle, rose petals, borage, bachelor's buttons, johnny-jump ups, and calendulas. For visual interest, you can add a dollop of whipped cream in the cake's center or slightly off-center so that some of your flowers are raised up off the surface of the cake; arrange the flowers like you would a floral arrangement.

Dusting the flowers with superfine sugar adds an elegant, sparkly effect. (Candied violets and candied rose petals are available at cake decorating supply stores and some supermarkets.)
Be sure when using flowers as a decoration that they are clean, all the parts you are using are non-toxic, and that they are pesticide-free.

Fruit

Fresh berries are a colorful, flavorful addition to almost any dessert plate. They can be piled on top of your cake, whether plain, sugared, or glazed with a shiny syrup. Whole strawberries placed around the outside of a chocolate cake add a touch of color, especially if they're livened up with a few fresh mint leaves. Kiwi slices, grapes, orange sections, and strawberries can be arranged on the top of a cake and glazed with a sugar syrup or thinned melted jelly. Fresh sliced figs with dollops of whipped cream arranged decoratively on the top of a cake are an artful touch.

Frosted whole fruits, such as lady apples, seckel pears, figs and clusters of grapes are wonderful decorations for late summer and fall wedding cakes.
Cut fruit will not last as long as whole berries, so be sure to serve your cake within a few hours of decorating to prevent fruit from "weeping" into the cake or frosting.

Nuts

Toasted or candied nuts are terrific on carrot cakes and spice cakes. Finely chopped or coarsely ground nuts can be pressed into the sides of a frosted cake, or along the bottom edge, for added flavor and texture (and to hide thumbprints, dents or other small flaws!).