Fall is almost upon us! If you’re looking for a fun autumnal cake decorating idea, look no further. For this fall leaf cake design you will need a palette knife, extra buttercream, a few piping bags fitted will small round tips, and a frosted cake!
How to Paint a Fall Leaves Cake
Prepare your cake and buttercream
You can use this painting technique on any size cake you like. I frosted a six inch three layer cake with Swiss meringue buttercream and had plenty of frosting leftover for painting. You don’t need a lot a frosting for this technique.
Swiss meringue buttercream is great for painting cakes, but you can actually use pretty much any type of buttercream you like! Just note that if you’re using a crusting buttercream you might need to work a little more quickly.
Mix your buttercream colors
If you have a small sheet tray I find these work great as a palette for your buttercream “paints.” I used gel food coloring to mix some red, orange, yellow, and brown buttercream.
If you ‘d like your colors to look a bit more natural and muted, trying blending them a bit to create custom colors. I mixed a little brown into my other colors to tone them down.
Paint the leaves
To paint the leaves on this cake I looked at a few reference photos to get an idea of what shapes to use.
Next, I started by painting the ends of each leaf lobe. To paint pointed ends, simply press your palette knife into the cake and drag away from the tip. (This works best with a tapered palette knife shape).
To paint rounded ends, wiggle the palette knife around a bit before dragging away from the tip.
Continue adding more buttercream to connect the lobes and fill in where you think the leaves should be thicker.
To paint a stem, pick up a very small line of buttercream on the edge of your palette knife and tap it into place.
Pipe the doodles
Use a small round tip to pipe simple line designs around and between the painted leaves on your cake. I used a number 2 round tip but you could also use a slightly larger tip.
Relax and have fun piping out the doodles! There’s not wrong way to pipe these. Try mixing swirls, zig-zags, stars, and dots.
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