Painting With Buttercream

I've been seeing this a lot on cake sites.  You treat the frosting like oil paint if you're going for a textured effect, or simply brush on diluted pigment and paint directly on the frosting for more of a watercolor look.

To say I'm not a visual artist is an understatement.  I can't draw, and all my painting looks impressionistic at best.  For cakes, piping tips help a lot and I did use them for some of this design.  I wanted most of the leaves to be impressionistic, with a few piped on, and had enough left in the bag to do long grass with the same tip.  The clouds are painted on white food coloring, because there actually is such a thing.

I'm not going to Bob Ross my way through a specific design.  There are a few YouTube videos that do it, including a Preppy Kitchen.  Frankly, I think he did it just to show off his box of every gel food color.  This post is just to explain the techniques I used to make the cake at the top of the post.

1.  Trim and crumb coat.  I really hate crumb coating.  To me, that part is way harder than the actual decorating.  The cinnamon chip cake was especially difficult because it was so soft.  Giant chunks (snacks) fell off and had to get patched.  Fortunately, all I really wanted was something to keep the cinnamon from bleeding into the top coat.  Freeze.

2.  Separate out how much frosting you think you will need for your design and color the rest your base color.  Mine was sky blue.  Frost, then clean up your edges.  The frosting was kind of soft, so I piped it on the cake, spread it around, then smoothed it.  Freeze the cake solid, so the base coat doesn't get picked up in the design.

3.  Start layering on your design.  Anything in the background should go first, so it can be covered by the elements in the foreground.  I started with piping brown vines.  I could have done it by painting the pigment directly onto the base coat, like I did for the edge of the geode cake.  Freeze after each layer, again so the layer stays separate.

4.  Here's where I got out the paintbrush.  I colored some of the remaining blue soft frosting green, after getting it to room temperature.  Then, taking a NEW paintbrush or one that's never been used on paint, dip into the frosting and go for it.  The consistency of your frosting should be like a thick, gooey paint.  You can even use an offset palette knife.  After chilling again, you can go back with the brush and add accent colors with pigment diluted in vodka or luster dust.  I glittered up some of the leaves, but not all of them.

4a.  An alternate method for preparing your frosting colors is to squirt out a few colors on a plate and work them into the white frosting with the brush, like an artist would do on a palette with pigments.  This way, no two blobs of frosting will be exactly the same color, just like in oil painting.

5.  Go for texture.  I used a 65 leaf tip, the smallest I have, to add extra leaves and create the grass at the base.  I added pink to a bit of the blue frosting, then dabbed on the flowers wherever I thought they needed to be.

6.  You can paint directly onto a flat surface of buttercream.  The clouds are undiluted white food coloring brushed on.  Be very sparing if you're going to put it on straight.  Gel food coloring is intense and will stain your hands for days.

7.  Freeze the cake often while working, especially if you notice other layers being picked up by the brush, but the finished product can be kept at room temperature, filling permitting.  Every layer or half hour, whichever came first, it went back in the freezer for at least 15 minutes.

8.  I had a really great time with this one, maybe because it turned out exactly like I envisioned.  That doesn't usually happen with my attempts at visual arts.  It also tasted really good, which is really what's most important.  Everyone has seen a beautiful wedding cake that tastes awful.  It's probably why most guests don't actually eat the cake at a big party.  Grocery store cakes are usually better tasting, and can be used as the ones actually served.  But I digress...

Difficulty rating  :)