Decorating my bird cage cake

Several weeks ago I shared with you my Christmas cake, shaped like a bird cage and then how to marzipan bird cage shaped cake. Last week I shared how I iced my cake, so finally this week I show you how I decorated it!

How to decorate bird cage shaped cake
Ingredients

• Gluten free birdcage shaped Christmas cake covered in a layer of marzipan and iced
• Royal Icing
• Ready to roll white icing
• Petal paste roses (instructions coming soon...)
• Petal paste bird (instructions coming soon...)
• Fondant snowflakes (instructions coming soon...)
• Pink edible beads
• Fondant holly leaves (instructions coming soon...)
• Iced ring
• Pink, green and white edible glitter
• Aqua edible dust

Equipment

• Rolling pin
• Bakers twine
• Pins
• Piping bag fitted with small circular nozzle
• Wooden cocktail sticks
• FMM textured lace set

Method

• To get your bird cage even, start by placing a length of bakers twine over the top of your cake and pin in place, so that you have divided the cake in half
• Continue pinning bakers twine to your cake until you have segmented the cake into 12 pieces
• Lightly push the string into the cake so you are left with small indentations and remove string entirely
• Lightly sieve icing sugar on to your work top and knead white icing until soft and pliable. Then, using a rolling pin, roll into a long shape about 5mm thick, i.e. at least the width of the lace imprint and long enough to go round the cake

• Push lace imprint into rolled out icing strip, continue until strip has imprint from end to end. Using a sharp knife, trim sides of strip, lightly brush cooled boiled water onto back of strip and adhere to bottom of cake. Trim off excess at ends
• Make up royal icing as package instructions
• Spoon into piping bag fitted with circular nozzle

• Starting at the top of the cake, carefully pipe a strip of royal icing down one of the indentations in the cake
• Continue until you have all of the cage spindles piped
• Roll out fondant icing as before and cut a small circle out using a round cookie cutter, lightly brush the back of your fondant circle with water and place at top of the cake in the centre
• Then roll a small ball out of white fondant icing and attach to the top of the cake using a wooden tooth pick

• Lightly sieve icing sugar on to your work top and knead white icing until soft and pliable. Then, using a rolling pin, roll into a long shape about 5mm thick, that is at least the width of the lace imprint and long enough to go round the cake
• Push lace imprint into rolled out icing strip, continue until strip has imprint from end to end
• Using a sharp knife, trim sides of strip, lightly brush cooled boiled water onto back of strip and adhere to the top straight part of the cake. Trim off excess at ends

• Brush edible white glitter on to spindles of cage
• Continue brushing white edible glitter on to cage
• Brush aqua cake shimmer onto blue icing
• Work out the position of your petal paste bird and push bird foot into cake

• Pipe a small dab of white royal icing onto the front of your fondant bird, line bird up with its foot and push into the side of the cake
• Pipe a small dab of royal icing onto the back of the fondant roses and place them at the top and bottom of the cake
• Pipe a small dab of royal icing onto the back of the holly leaves and place them at the top and bottom of the cake

• Pipe a small dab of white royal icing onto the edible pink beads and place next to the holly leaves on the cake
• Using edible glitters, dust roses with pink glitter and leaves with green glitter
• Pipe a small dab of white royal icing onto the back of the snowflakes and place on cake
• Attach iced ring to ball on top of cake and lightly dust entire cake with sieved icing sugar

Here it is on my Winter Wonderland table



Have a sweet day!