Royal Icing Celebration Cakes - Update

It has been a while since I updated the blog about my cake decorating course - I received my result and my certificate in the post last week and I'm happy to say that I received a Merit! The final cake I had to decorate on the course was a square celebration cake, which I chose to decorate as a Christening/Baby Naming Ceremony cake. As my sister-in-law to be was pregnant, I decided to decorate the cake for the baby. A few days before the cake was completed, she had a baby boy named Ellis and this is the finished design, decorated in honour of him. 

One of the cakes that was not an assessed component of the course was a royal iced Christmas cake. As this cake was not being assessed, I gave it its coat of royal icing, but didn't get round to completing it. It has been bugging me, so I decided to finish it off. I decided I wanted the cake to have a homespun, slightly kitsch feel to it, so I used my gingerbread man run-out decoration as the central part of my design. I made tiny holly leaf run-outs and candy canes, which would be the decoration for the sides of the cake.

One of the challenges of the design was to pipe the 'Merry Christmas' greeting in script style handwriting using red icing. I decided to pipe the greeting in white icing first and then over-pipe this in red, to minimize the effects of any mistakes. The 's' scroll and shell borders 'frame' the cake and the green over-piping on the shell border pulls the scheme together, unifying the various red and green aspects of the design. The finishing touch is red grosgrain ribbon with tiny white stitch borders - perfect for the homespun feel I was aiming for. I might use a number 2 tube in future for the 'Merry Christmas' greeting as the tube can get quite easily blocked and ruin the fluency of the script needed for a perfect finish.

Loved decorating the cakes though and I'm looking forward to doing similar designs for celebration cake orders!

Becky Bakeswell