Cakes

Day with Rachael Ray. I'm gonna show you how to decorate a cake with everyday treats. I have a cake that's frosted with vanilla butter cream and I have fruits and nuts and lots of candies for us to work with. I'm gonna start by-- well first, I wanna tell you that you don't have to worry just about the top of the cake . You can decorate the sides of the cake with lots of things. I have some chopped [unk] here. You wanna make sure that the nuts are finely chopped so that there'll adhere to the icing well. You can also use chocolate Jimmy sprinkles or multi-colored sprinkles and you can use chopped cookies too. Now you wanna hold the cake over the bowl of the nuts and just pick up a handful of nuts in your palm. Put them up against the cake and lightly pat. Now some of them are gonna fall off but we'll clean that up later on. So you can go all the way around and have a nice nutty edge of the cake . Okay. Another thing that we can do is use fruit. I have sliced kiwis and I have strawberries and I'm gonna put those on another section of the cake . Using fresh fruit is a pretty way to simply put a nice edge to a cake . Another fruit in that idea is to make flowers with sliced almonds and raspberries and blueberries. To do this, you're gonna use

as the petals of the flower. Now this works better if you're cake is at room temperature and then you could chill it after you get the flowers put on the cake . You can-- you also do these on the side of the cake too. Since we're doing the berries, it's a fun idea if this is for birthday or special celebration for a particular person. You could do a monogram on the top of the cake with the berry. I'm gonna mark with a toothpick [unk] on top of the cake . It comes out nicer if you use-- if you have a guide so the toothpick is a great way to have-- make a guide for yourself. And you can just align the berries along the line. And so that's a really cute, really cute version there. And next I'm gonna work with candies, try to keep your area clean as you work so you don't get foreign crumbs all over your cake . Now for this one, on top of the cake , I'm gonna make a stencil out of coco powder. And my friend Vanessa made me a nice simple stencil which I probably couldn't do if I tried. Gotta lay this on top, just lightly touch it on the cake . Some coco powder or if you have a chocolate cake , you can use confectioner sugar and just lightly tap. Wanna be thorough but not too heavy with the coco dusting. I'm gonna move this out of the way and carefully lift off the stencil. And that looks really sweet. Okay, I'm gonna move this first cake out of the way so we can have fun with the second one. Okay now, we can use-- we have lots of candy here. I like to use two different size candies it makes it look very whimsical. Candy coated, chocolate candies are great, have nonpareils. I have jellied fruit candies but will do believes these and I would just press them in, into the sides. You want the cake to be room temp for the things to stick on the side better. I'm gonna use some big ones and little ones sort of, you know, not to be in a particular pattern. It's more fun if they are all over the place. Okay, I'm gonna try a few nonpareils so you could see what that looks like. These look really great on a chocolate iced cake , the white dots really pop and kids love jellied fruit candies. So again, I'm gonna try the different colors all around. Here we have some really fun ideas for decorating a cake with candy and fresh fruit. I'm Tracey Seaman and thanks for watching.