All over the world, dishes are given as much importance as decorating . It’s enough to see at least once how the food is decorated in restaurants - leaflets of greens, flowers from vegetables, sauce poured on a plate with a fancy pattern. Of course, not every housewife can compete in this art with professionals involved in haute cuisine, but, nevertheless, anyone can adequately decorate a festive treat.
How to decorate a cake? The easiest option is fruits and berries. It’s not worth it to choose apples, bananas and other similar fruits that darken in the air after a quarter of an hour. But mandarin slices, grapes, cherries may well work. Before decorating the cake, seeds are usually taken out of the fruits, large fruits are cut into slices or divided into several parts.
Berries are very suitable for this purpose - all types of currants, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries. It is best to take ripe, fresh rather than frozen fruits. From them you can form a variety of patterns on the surface of the cake. Small berries you can lay out animal figures, or arrange them in a circle, alternating colors. You can place the berries darker in the center, and around the edges - more light - in general, everything that the fantasy tells you.
If fresh fruit and berries are out of season, you can decorate the cake with confectionery powder, powdered sugar or coconut, which is sold at any grocery store.
If you have an important holiday - a wedding, a birthday, or the New Year, you can’t do with fruit alone. In this case, you can use the decoration of protein cream, chocolate or glaze.
Before decorating a wedding cake, you should decide on its design. Some people like massive, multi-layered compositions decorated with dozens of roses, while others are delighted with the delicate graceful painting. Here's the recipe for protein glaze suitable for the latter: they mix the protein of one egg, a glass of powdered sugar and a teaspoon of lemon juice. Triturate so that the mass becomes homogeneous, and fill it with a confectionery syringe, having previously installed a nozzle with a small hole on it. Now you can start the decoration process. Either apply icing directly on the surface of the cake, drawing on it ornate twigs, leaflets, butterflies, or use a stencil.
On a piece of paper, grass, butterflies and an original ornament are drawn with an ordinary pencil, and then sugar icing is applied in its wake. Allow it to cool, and then gently separate the frozen figures from the paper. It is better not to make large and complex flowers and twigs without experience - they are easy to break. The resulting figures can be laid horizontally on the surface, or you can stick them from above into the cake itself.
A similar operation can be done with dark and light chocolate - first melt, then pour into a syringe and, until the sweet mass has frozen, put a picture on a cake or stencil.
With the help of sugar protein glaze, you can get only a delicate and elegant pattern. Volumetric flowers are best created with whipped cream or butter cream.
How to decorate a cake with cream? Take a spray can and apply this mass on the surface of the cake, garnish gaps with strawberry slices or pieces of kiwi.
Before decorating the cake for the holiday, you need to prepare an oil cream. Half a packet of butter is mixed with half a glass of sugar, ½ can of condensed milk, yolk and a teaspoon of brandy. The ingredients are mixed and whipped, filled with a confectionery syringe and decorate the cake through a curly nozzle. By the way, this cream can be applied to the surface before decorating the cake with fruit.
How to decorate a children's cake? Take multi-colored caramel, fruits, bright confectionery powder, nuts - in general, everything that comes to hand. The brighter and more fun the cake is, the better!