Whether you plan to adorn your cake with bouquets of roses or a colorful picture created with stencils and cake spray paint, a nice smooth icing adds professionalism as well as making it easier to decorate.



Two excellent choices for your canvas are buttercream

icing and the rolled Marshmallow Fondant from the "Cake Decorating Made Easy!" Video Books.

The fluffy, peaked frostings that most of us use on our first cakes before moving on to smooth icings are great for simple cake decorating ideas.

You can make a nice dessert for your family with nothing more than a great cake recipe, a yummy, homemade frosting, and a sprinkling of shaved chocolate, grated coconut, finely chopped nuts, candied red hearts, gumdrops or colorful candied sprinkles.

However, with a smoothly iced cake, you have a blank canvas waiting to be transformed into a work of art with your decorating ideas!

Some of the best places for finding great decorating ideas are cake decorating forums and cake decorating membership sites where you can glean ideas from hobbyists and pros alike, as well as share your own ideas.

For example, here's a great idea that we found and have since added our own ideas to. That's another thing about looking at others ideas, They spark your imagination and pretty soon you have your own bag of tricks!

Cookie Cutters for Cake Decorating.

Here's how it works. Let's say you are making a congratulations cake or a baby shower "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" themed cake. Having iced stars on your cake would be perfect, yes?

However, no matter how steady your hand is, it's pretty difficult to draw stars with a decorating bag (some of us have a hard enough time on paper!).

Stencils are one option, but if you don't want to mess around with stencils, try this decorating idea we found:

1. Use a cookie cutter to make a pattern on your cake that's easy to trace. (This could be one large pattern or several smaller ones forming a balanced design on your cake.)

2. Gently press the cookie cutter into the smooth icing. Lift up, and there's your pattern waiting to be traced!

3. Then fit your icing bag with a small round tip (like you'd use for writing the message) and trace the outline of each of the stars.

4. Finally, leave as is, or try one of these decorating ideas:

a. Make the stars twinkle with some coloring dust.

b. Fill each star in with icing gel.

c. Create silver stars by filling them in with cake decorating silver beads.

d. Fit your icing bag with the star tip (because it's the best one for filling in pictures quickly) and color your stars.

The plastic cookie cutters that make the detailed impressions, such as the Christmas Santa, will give you even more of a pattern to play with.

A visit to a craft store or baking supply store should yield a large array of cookie cutters from which to choose, including everything from cute baby animals to holiday themes such as Jack o' lanterns and Santa's.

As you are gathering cake decorating ideas, keep in mind the overall design you want on your cake. To jumpstart your imagination, take a look at our Cake Design Ideas.

Here's another decorating idea: Dark colored cakes that are moist enough not to need icing, such as fruitcakes, can be simply decorated with some confectioners' (powdered) sugar sprinkled over a stencil (or doily). At Christmas time, try snowflake stencils!