Easter cake decorating ideas and tips
Wednesday 16th March 2016
If you’ve been particularly good then you may have said ‘no’ to naughty sweet things throughout the entirety of Lent. If that is the case, then Easter Sunday is the perfect time to celebrate the end of your period of self-discipline by creating delicious bakes for our favourite movable feast.
Traditionally an Easter cake is a fruit cake. Our delicious fruit cake recipe is a firm favourite, but you can use any cake mixture you like for your show-stopping Easter bake. There are all sorts of ways to approach the decoration of your Easter cake from the traditional to the more quirky. Here are our top decorating ideas for your Easter centrepiece this year.
Traditional simnel cake recipe
The traditional Simnel cake has been enjoyed since medieval times. It is a delicious, yet highly symbolic fruit cake topped with eleven marzipan balls, each representing Christ’s eleven apostles, minus Judas. You do need to be a marzipan fan to really enjoy this cake, but decorating it is very simple and requires only good marzipan rolling and toasting skills. Augment with any number of chocolate eggs, fluffy chicks and bunnies should you wish to. Tying a yellow ribbon around it is also a cheerful addition.
Who doesn’t love an Easter Bunny? Especially one that’s made of cake! You’ll need four sponge tins to make this cake. Once you’ve fashioned the rabbit shape from your sponges, a few icing skills are required to bring out the full bunny personality of the cake. Kneading the icing to achieve the right consistency will assist you when it comes to creating a smooth covering for the cake. Drape the sheet of icing carefully over the cake and use the side of your hand to smooth out any bumps. The character of the rabbit is important, so experiment with eye shapes and ears to create the right bunny features, or you can follow our straightforward instructions.
This is another feat of icing ingenuity, The compelling straw effect is created by pushing icing through a sieve or a garlic press (make sure there are no trace elements of garlic if using the latter!). You can use the same technique to create the grass upon which the egg sits. As above, you’ll need 4 cake tins to lend this cake the necessary height.
This is a very simple but very pretty Easter cake. The daisy icing decoration against the pastel green fondant brings to mind the gentle warmth of emerging spring days. The trick to giving the daisies their authentic shape is to rest them in an egg box to set for a couple of hours. A little boiled water is all you need to adhere them to the smooth fondant cake covering. It’s the quality of the icing that makes this cake so appealing to look at, so it’s worth getting the right consistency before anything else through kneading.
For more inspired Easter recipes and cake decorating ideas have a look at our Easter recipe archive