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Licensed To Frill: Beautifying Your Cakes With Ruffles

Tuesday 17th February 2015

Every year sees different sugarcrafting and decorative techniques becoming wildly popular in the baking world. This year ruffles and frills are big, and you’ll see them adorning cakes everywhere.

Want to add a touch of elegance to your next cake? We’ll have you making ruffles in no time.

Ruffles With Ready To Roll Icing

Ready to Roll Icing is ideal for making ruffles. You can make quite fine and delicate ruffles without them collapsing or tearing, and they look simply gorgeous.

Here’s how to make some ruffles using icing. Grab the following:

  • Ready to Roll Icing
  • Rolling pin
  • Sharp knife or wheel cutter
  • Ball tool
  • Foam pad
  • Icing sugar

Dust down your work surface with some icing sugar then knead your ready to roll icing until it’s pliable. All it takes is a few simple steps to get beautiful ruffles:

  • 1.Roll out your icing into a rough square shape. Keep the depth thin, no more than 2mm.
  • 2.Using your knife or wheel cutter slice the icing into narrow strips.
  • 3.Put an icing strip onto your foam pad, lightly dust with icing sugar and then run your ball tool along once edge of the strip. Keep the ball half on the icing and half off. As you run it along the icing pull the tool away from the icing and you’ll find the edge ruffles up nicely.

You can stick Ready to Roll Icing ruffles to your cake by painting a strip of cooled boiled water onto the cake’s icing and then pressing the ruffle into place.

How To Use Icing Ruffles

You can use icing ruffles on large cakes as in the image above, but they also work well as a cupcake topper. Add a smooth layer of frosting to the top of your cupcake, then once your icing is ruffled carefully bend it into a curve and lay on top of the frosting. Continue to layer ruffles until the cupcake top is covered.

Cake pops can also be made ruffle-icious. Dip your cake pop in our Colour Melts and let it harden. Then simply ruffle up small strips of icing and fix it around the cake pop using some cooled boiled water.

Ruffles With Buttercream

All you need to achieve buttercream ruffles are:

  • A piping bag filled with buttercream
  • A petal piping tip

Before beginning coat your cake in a thin layer of buttercream. Ruffles can be piped on horizontally or vertically.

Horizontal Ruffles

  • 1.Hold your piping bag with the fatter end of the petal tip at the bottom. Press the bottom firmly into the cake to stop the buttercream sagging but angle the top away slightly.
  • 2.Use light pressure to squeeze out the buttercream, tracking tightly around the top of the cake. You’ll find that the buttercream will naturally ruffle
  • 3.Pipe further layers of ruffles underneath the each other working your way down the cake.

Vertical Ruffles

Vertical ruffles also use a petal tip, but the technique is different. You start from the bottom of the cake and pipe the ruffle in a stack up to the top.

  • 1.Hold the piping bag with the thick end of the tip against the cake and the thin end away from the cake.
  • 2.Gently squeeze out the buttercream. As you do use a back and forth motion to layer the buttercream on top of itself, a bit like a Mr. Whippy ice cream.
  • 3.Repeat around the cake.

Buttercream ruffles can be used to coat a cake entirely, or could be used to create a standalone decoration on the cake. They can also easily be applied to cupcakes for a fancy variation on the usual swirl top.

Will you be using ruffles in your baking in 2015? We’d love to see how you put this hot baking trend to use on your cakes, so show us your efforts on social media.

You can find more useful articles on decorating and baking on our
blog.

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