If you think creating stunning holiday cake decorations is only for master chefs — think again. I’ll show you several techniques that don’t need years’ experience, pastry school, or whatever education to create a masterpiece that will get all the raves and make people think you’ve practiced cake decoration for years!
I wanted to create my own series of easy holiday cake decorations because those really don’t exist. When you try to google for easy holiday cake decoration ideas, you’ll end up with complicated methods where you have to master piping, cutting out patterns from fondant, smooth out the buttercream frosting perfectly, etc. And that’s not simple! Therefore, I wanted to create something that an absolute beginner can also master.
This first holiday cake decoration idea needs neither piping skills — nor rolling out fondant. You don’t even need to be able to smooth the buttercream, because it’s covered with meringues. So, this is a very easy decoration to make, however, it does need some patience, though.
After decorating the cake, it should be served within a few hours to prevent the meringue from getting soggy.
For this decoration, you’ll need:
- 6-inch cake
- 3 cups buttercream frosting
- store bought white meringues
- silver-colored sugar pearls (large are easier to handle)
- cake topper (like this one or this one)
So, here’s how to decorate the cake. This decoration is made for a 6-inch cake.
Prepare some buttercream frosting. In this post, there’s my favorite recipe for buttercream frosting. You can use that. You need 3 cups of buttercream frosting to fill and frost the cake. You can naturally use store bought frosting for even easier and quicker preparation. Here are some ideas how to improve store bought frosting.
Fill the cake and frost it. Remember, you don’t need a sleek and smooth finish as you are going to cover the cake with meringues.
Next, take your meringues and start placing them on the sides of the cake, like this:
Fits perfectly!
Cover also the top of the cake with meringues, starting from the center:
Proceeding to the edges:
Until you’ve covered the whole top:
Don’t despair if there’s a gap:
You can either leave it (because it really doesn’t matter) or then you can pipe some more buttercream frosting with a star tip to fill the gap:
Again, don’t despair if your piping is not perfect; you are going to add silver pearls that perfectly cover the possible defects.
Next, you need the silver-colored sugar pearls and some glue to attach them to the cake. Edible glue is fine as is royal icing. But the simplest way is to use some buttercream frosting. Take a small dab of your glue and add a dab to the silver pearl. Next, place the pearl on the tip of the meringue so that it looks like this:
Continue until all the tips have pearls on them, also the top of the cake. If you have those pipings covering the gap, place plenty of pearls on those, too. Cooking tweezers really help here!
Looks really professional now!
Finally, add an appropriate cake topper, preferably something silver-colored and holiday-themed.
Voila! Self-made, yet looks like from the hands of a professional pastry chef. And you can make it, too!
