How to Paint with Gold | Wedding Cakes

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Let chef Michelle Doll show you how to paint a wedding cake with gold in this Howcast video about wedding cake decorating.


So we want to paint with gold our embellishments on the cake. It's going to make them really pop, give a really nice, sophisticated air to the cake. I'm using some vodka. The reason you want to use alcohol and not water is because alcohol evaporates really, really quickly. So we can make a paste and our gold will set up. You always want to start with the alcohol. You don't want to add your alcohol to the gold luster dust.

What I have in here is gold luster dust. You can apply it either dry, almost like as if it were eye shadow. That's pretty awesome or you can mix it with the alcohol and make a paint. I'm going to show you how to do it both ways. First, I'll take a little bit out from the table here. I'm going to grab a dry paintbrush and just like if it was makeup I fill my brush up.

The problem with applying gold this way is that it can drop down a little bit as you're going. So you have to be okay with having some gold flecks all over your cake. It's also not going to be as heavy a coverage, but it's going to be kind of glimmery. I'm going do some shading, build it up, more and more or you can add your gold to the alcohol.

It gets like a mercury effect. What's kind of awesome about this is if you wind up using all of your gold, this is $6.00 for this type of gold powder, you can actually add alcohol to it again, after it dries out and use that as a paint at a later time. We want it to be a fairly thick consistency. It's just going to make it easier to paint.

There I go, it's kind of awesome, and I go on it kind of thickly to get a nice, almost gold foil-like effect. There you go and I'm just letting it fill itself in. So there are some different ways you can paint using gold luster dust.