Homemade cakes are valued higher than those bought at the store. After all, they are made only from natural products, each housewife bakes them with love and mood, and the recipe for a homemade cake or pie, even if it is taken from a book or the Internet, is always individual, there are no two identical products baked at home. The only difficulty housewives face is beautiful design and worthy decoration of their masterpieces. Here it is difficult to compete with confectionery factories and professional confectioners.
It is very difficult to make a variety of roses and leaves of cream, cream and caramel at home, because this requires remarkable skill and professionalism. But do not despair, because homemade cakes are delicious in any form and will be of constant popularity, even if they are simply sprinkled with nuts and crumbs of dough. But still, every housewife wants to show off not only culinary, but also decoration skills, and then the question arises: how to decorate a cake at home to make it tasty and beautiful? Here simple and very effective methods come to the rescue - decorating cakes with fruits, jelly and marmalade. Decorating cakes with fruits is perhaps the easiest and very beautiful way to make not only a delicious cake, but also very attractive. Moreover, this does not require special skill. Fruits are beautiful in themselves with their colors, freshness, mouth-watering forms. It’s enough to “correct” them a little, to strengthen the attractiveness with certain tricks in order to turn the cake into a masterpiece, stimulating the appetite, from which it will be impossible to take your eyes off. How to decorate a cake with fruit? Here the main sense of proportion, artistic taste and imagination.
Decorating cakes with fruits opens up a limitless field for creativity and improvisation. Any fruit in any form can be safely used for decoration. Zealous housewives in the early fall, making preparations for the winter from vegetables and fruits, take care to prepare two or three jars of candied fruits especially for decorations. But fresh fruits are in stores all year round, so boiling them in syrup in advance is not necessary. You can make the necessary preparations immediately before decorating or, at worst, use a ready-made compote, it will also work.
Decorations for fruit cake are delicious, very beautiful and much more useful than multi-layered butter-cream floral "towers". As a base cake, cakes from any dough are suitable. Sometimes, the top layer of fruit, jelly or marmalade makes up two-thirds of the whole cake and almost completely determines its taste. Therefore, by combining several biscuit or sand cakes in the form of a basket and filling it with fruits and nuts, you can get a culinary masterpiece that delights guests.
So, first we bake the base, making a groove in the cakes in the form of a basket. Now fill this basket with any fruits and berries. We leave small berries (currants, strawberries, gooseberries, blackberries, etc.) in their original form. We cut large fruits (oranges, apples, pears, etc.) along into thin mugs and cook in sugar syrup until they become soft, but at the same time retain their shape and do not spill. From these circles we will then add flower heads: roses, lilies, water lilies. Grapes, plums are cut into halves, the kiwi regimen is cut into circles or figured with cloves. After all the fruits are sliced and cooked in syrup, we proceed to the design of the basket. At the bottom of the basket or on the surface of the upper cake layer, apply a layer of cream, jam or jam, then we stack the fruits in an arbitrary order so that a composition pleasing to the eye is obtained. Here you can start from the middle, collecting larger fruits in the center in the form of flowers, and lay a scattering of smaller ones to the edges. The cornucopia looks very impressive on the flat surface of the cake - fruits laid in a semicircle on one of the sides, starting with the largest and ending with small ones. After the decoration of the cakes with fruits is completed, they are covered with a thin layer of melted confiture or jelly. To do this, melt the confiture in a pan on the stove, and then apply a warm mass to the fruit decor with a brush, or make fruit jelly according to the recipe and while it is still warm, but not hot, also apply to fresh fruit with a brush. Fruit boiled in syrup does not need gelation. They will look more impressive, slightly sprinkled with powdered sugar.
You can decorate with fruit not only cakes, but also small confectionery. The principle of decoration and preparation is the same. For the first time, everything may not turn out exactly as it was intended, but the whole charm of the fruit decor is that no matter how elegantly or extremely simply the product was decorated, it will in any case be very attractive and tasty.