Wedding Cake Finishing Touches | Wedding Cakes

Watch more How to Decorate a Wedding Cake videos:

Let chef Michelle Doll show you how to put beautiful finishing touches on a wedding cake in this Howcast video.


A really great way to finish off your cake is with some fun wedding cake embellishments. What I have here are some clay tools. They're actually-- you can fill them in, little cavities, that you can get a great, really highly detailed finish to add to your cake. So what I'm going to do is take some of my gum paste that's been softened out with a little bit of vegetable shortening.

We're going to roll a very technical snake. Pop that into the cavity and then just press it down evenly all the way across. I don't want to use too much paste, because then I have to go back and trim away from the side. So you're better off with a little less than more. All right? It tends to stick in there, so I'll just use the Exacto blade to take it out, and you see what I get is this really fun pattern. This one's kind of like a wheat sheaf.

And I'm going to attach that to the bottom of my cake to make a sort of border, do this around the top. And I'm just using water for this, because it's going to dry. It'll attach to the gum paste and then dry completely. I don't want to press too hard on it or else it's going to lose some of its detail. I've pre-made a couple of these, so we'll just add them all on together. And again, you don't want to pool or get little puddles of water, because it will make little divets in your cake.

There we go. I like to look at architectural elements as well, to really inspire cake design. This is definitely something that falls into that category. I don't need as long as piece to fit in there. I'll just snip off the end with my trusty Exacto blade. So it's a great way to do borders. If you don't like the joining parts, by all means you can make little beads, roll up some circles. It helps it to look a little bit more finished.

The trick is to make your beads all the same size, so I always try to imagine what size this is. These are like small blueberries. It makes it easier for me to mentally replicate them. And I'd like to do a few more little embellishments just to give you an idea of how the mats work. Here is one of my clay mats. All of my designs are a little bit formal for this kind of cake with polka dot, sort of stripey pattern. But when we paint them all gold, they're going to look really amazing.

Same method I'm just filling in the cavity, not letting it overflow. A little bit of water and I'll just do four of these. The more formal the element is, the more I think it should be repeated evenly. You wouldn't want to do scattered architectural elements, it would look a little bit clumsy. Trace it over to the other side. So those are some really fun gum paste adornments.