Food Decorating

What is it all about?

Creativity can be a piece of cake (or bread or other food)! This project teaches youth how to start making food for parties and events. It may start with knowing and practicing cake decorating skills and advance to creating beautiful works of food art. The only limits are ingredients and imagination!

Grow in Your Project

Beginner

Prepare icing to use for borders, drop flowers, and lettering
Experiment with different decorating tips
Learn about professional cake decorating equipment
Decorate with borders, flowers, leaves, and letters
Use a stencil and paper pattern to decorate a cake

Intermediate

Bake and frost level cakes with smooth icing
Bake and frost two-layer cakes with jam, pudding, or other filling
Make flat surface flowers and flowers on a nail
Learn piping techniques
Learn advanced borders like lattice, basket weave, pine cones, and haystacks
Consider cake size, shape, decorating placement, and number of servings

Advanced

Assemble stacked and tiered cakes
Experiment with gum paste
Color and shape marzipan for decorations
Make pulled sugar decorations
Apply rolled fondant to a cake and decorate it
Study the principles of element and design used in cake decorating

Member Resources

Free Downloads

4-H Cake Decorating (1 level, all grades)
Cake Decorating Project Sheet

Take Your Project Further!

Visit a bakery to see cake decorating in action
Create drawings for decorating ideas using the internet or magazines as inspiration
Attend a food or restaurant show
Visit a professional decorator to get new ideas
Interview a home decorator about markets, pricing, and advertising
Attend a cake decorating class
Attend a wedding cake consultation
Compare and contrast different brands of cake mixes or food colorings

Applying Project Skills to Life

Enhance Your Communication Skills

Give a demonstration about mixing colors for frosting cakes
Give a demonstration at your club meeting about how to ice a cake for decorating
Share common cake decorating problems with other project members

Get Involved in Citizenship and Service

Create birthday bags for the local food pantry
Make a decorated cake for your neighbor
Make a decorated cake for a fundraiser or silent auction
Host a cake walk at a 4-H carnival

Learn about Leadership

Work with a leader or your County Educator to host a Cupcake War
Hold a cake decorating workshop for younger members

Showing What You’ve Learned

Educational poster on advantages or disadvantages of different cake mixes
Educational poster on type of icing
Chart explaining tools to use for icing a cake
Poster explaining different borders and how to create them
Chart listing common cake problems
Create a scrapbook of cakes you have decorated
Display pictures of borders, writing, etc. that you have created on cakes
Decorate a cake
Sketchbook of different design for cake
Display of a marketing plan for a cake decorating business you want to open
Create an educational poster describing when to use different types of cake icings
Educational display of how to properly clean and care for cake decorating tools
Educational display on how to transport a cake once it is decorated

Adapted with permission from Wyoming State 4-H, Project Information Sheet, Cake Decorating. Retrieved from: https://www.uwyo.edu/4-h/projects/expressive-arts/cake-decorating.html.

Header image courtesy of Pavel Danilyuk via Pexels.

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