Decorating the cake - ideas, advice?

[loomer]

I've made a christmas cake for the first time this year... am taking it to my parents' on the big day, and want to make a good impression, as lots of rellies will be there, and my mum used to make (and decorate) cakes for a living (many, many moons ago).

I'm planning on a very thin layer of marzipan as I don't really like it myself, but ma said it stops the cake staining through the icing. Then will roll out my pre-bought royal icing and lay over the marzipan (..."at least one week later, you must let the marzipan harden off first!" says mother).

But then what?? I need ideas for decorating that are simple and stylish. Am thinking of getting a little star-shaped cutter and just having lots of white icing stars laid all over cake, maybe one or two painted gold (can you do this?? What would I use??).

marzipan is quite golden coloured, can you do marzipan gold stars?

ours tends to have mooses and reindeer all over it, dd1 has a moose fetish. but that might be a minority taste.

loolmer that sounds lovely. If you can't get gold dusting powder (from a specialist cake decorating shop) you could stud the stars with gold/silver balls. And buy a length of gorgeous ribbon to tie around the sides.

I think with cakes more is less. We have a cake shop in town that sells gold dusting powder that can be made into a paint with water - used the silver one for a light sabre bday cake - very effective!

Agree less is more, but this year DH has bought MrMen christmas candles to stick on ours, so it'll be more is more

I did ours last year and just did the ready roll white icing and then got some green coloured icing and rolled it out and then cut out a Xmas tree shape. Put that on top of cake and then decorated the tree with those little silver balls you can get in supermarkets. Wrapped large red ribbon around it and voila!

Saw a lovely idea in a BBC Good Food magazine for a nice cake with gingerbread biscuits in shape of Xmas treed and decorated with white icing to look like snow with a couple of snow balls and a little snow man. Cute and pretty simple.

The had another one where they used a star shaped cookie cutter to cut out shapes in the ready rolled icing once it is on the cake - cut through and stop when you get to the marzipan. Then the put some smaller star shapes in the star shape holes and fill around the gaps with those little balls again - they used gold. Looks nice.

If you're going for stars, you can stick them on the end of floristry wire (or any thin wire) and stand some up in the corner of the cake. We did this with a square cake, put 5 stars on wires in the corner & looked v effective. Would have looked fantastic in white with silver dust. Sadly all ours stars were purple or green - I allow the dds to pick designs/colours.

Also, never use marzipan as we all hate it. We just use apricot jam & roll the icing thicker. This may not pass muster if your rels are used to 'proper' cakes though!!

I did the stars thing once. You can buy gold coloured icing paint or dust. It was very easy and very effective. I had a set of 3 cutters and cut out different sized ones and laid them randomly on the top of the cake. It looked about as good as I have ever got a cake to look. My Dad is an icer too - did my wedding cake and my sisters.

Now I go on Leeds market and buy ready made icing sugar decorations - Santa, snowman etc. I let the DCs choose one each and one for Daddy.

I do make my own icing though because I think it tastes so much nicer. And also make my own marzipan. So I am not cutting all that many corners.

I used to make my own icing, until the year when I decided to do the slightly softer 'snow like' icing on the cake. Did my usual (no marzipan, apricot jam) but didn't look for the jam until too late & ended up using v. expensive apricot conserve instead - bad move.

Went to the Christmas carol concert with the dds, came back & my snow scene had avalanched all down the sides of the cake. I carefully scraped it up & back over the cake, unfortunately after mixing with the apricot conserve it looked like to reindeer all had continence problems . Now I buy the ready rolled - I know my limits!

These are all great tips. Maybe I won't bother with the marzipan at all then, although I did think that I could use it to even out any 'inconsistencies' in the cake itself. Nothing worse than wibbly-wobbly icing...

DH might go for a moose theme if he sees this thread (he's canadian). I love the idea of having some stars sticking up on wires too, it'll add some height to the decor, although I'm not sure whether I am sure-fingered enough to pull it off.

Bet those gingerbread decorations look really cute - don't think I'm confident enough to pull it off with the icing though, especially with Berries' tales of icing avalanches!

Frost some Fruit. This always looks so elegant. Get some fruit, Plums, currants of diffrent colors and chrries work best. Paink them with egg yolk the dip in some caster sugar and allow to dry. Arrange on top. Very pretty