How To Make Feathers For Your Cake

If you’re looking for a sugar crafting project to take your cake to the next level but you’ve already made dozens of flowers and butterflies try your hand at feathers. This looks set to be one of the hot cake design trends this year, with plenty of examples on display at cake shows.

Like so many other cake decorations, feathers don’t have to be hard. With some simple tools you can give your cakes a wonderful sense of texture and movement.

What Product To Use

You can make feathers with Ready to Roll Icing, marzipan or flower paste. If you want to make very intricate and delicate feathers you’re probably better off going for flower paste as it can retain its shape when much thinner than normal icing and marzipan. But if you want something simple and colourful you could try coloured marzipan, like this owl cake.

What Tools You’ll Need

• Feather cutter. This helps you press out the shape of the feather from your icing. It is possible to do this by hand with a sharp knife if you feel confident enough, but a cutter will ensure perfection each time.There are several tools you can use to make creating feathers easy:
• Embosser. You can use a silicone embosser to imprint the veined outline of the central shaft of the feather and the barbs. There are feather embossers or you can even use a leaf one.
• Sharp knife. Ideally you want one with a very fine blade – this is to texture the feather after embossing.

You could also add some edible paints or lustre dusts to your feathers to create a similar to these feather cake toppers by Cakegirls.

[Image via: thecakeblog.com]

How To Make Your Icing Feather

Follow these simple steps and you’ll be creating beautiful feathers in no time. In this example we’ll use flower paste but the same basic steps apply for Ready to Roll Icing and marzipan, you’ll just need to roll them out thicker.

• 1.After lightly dusting your work surface with icing sugar knead your flower paste until it’s soft and pliable.
• 2.Roll it out on the work surface to a depth of about 2mm.
• 3.Take your feather cutter, or sharp knife, and cut out the feather from the flower paste.
• 4.Gently place the feather onto the embossing sheet and press in the pattern. Do this on both sides of the feather, but make sure you line up the accurately.
• 5.Place your feather back onto the work surface and use your knife to gently cut into the edges of the feather, using the embossed pattern as a guide.
• 6.Once you have cut around the edges lift your feather up and gently pull it from both ends to separate out the barbs of the feather.

Depending on how you are going to use the feathers you can attach it to a sugar-crafted model or cake using some cooled boiled water once it has dried. Alternatively you can use wire to stick them into the cake. Just place the wire down the central spine of the flower and then use a small amount of flower paste to cover the wire over.

We’d love to see your feathery cakes. Be sure to share them with us on social media.