When bringing your cake to a special occasion, you'll most likely want your work to draw its much deserved attention. Unless you suffer from a pathological fear of receiving adoration and praise, in which case a simple, flat cake is your best bet.

Cake Decorating Themes

- Fun and Activity: These generally use shapes from balloons and clouds, to circles and stars. A fun extension might be using animal crackers to build a farm or a "zoo" cake. These cakes are always full of color! Your only conceivable limitation is your imagination.

- Flower Power: Floral patterns in soft shades are perfect for cake decorating. A few green leaves lighten up any special occasion. Just ask those wacky kids with their herbal cigarettes. Flowers are great on birthday cakes, wedding cakes, mothers day cakes, Guy Fawkes Day cakes, National Cola Miners Day cakes, and and for other happy celebrations.

- Romance and love: You can use absolutely any color frosting you want, but using the favorite color of the person your baking it for works best. Whats great about romantic cake decorating is the number of occasions you can use it for, whether it be valentines day, your wife or husbands birthday, an anniversary or a divorce. Add some hearts or cupids to remind your bedfellow what the celebration is for. Romance is all about imaginary, childish concepts, so it's hard to go overboard with the glitter and sparkly candies. Make it Jazzy!

- Cartooning It Up: Younger children, and some folks that are older but love being immature, love cartoon characters as much as they love cake. Therefore, it's a good idea to combine both when decorating a cake for the birthday of a cartoon aficianado. Either draw them in icing and color them in, or use fondant and molds to make the characters. After they are created, they can be colored before you place them on the cake. So invite Bugs Bunny, Taz, Tweety, Goofy, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Diaper Baby or Melvin The Hostile Martian to the party.

Vital Cake decorating supplies can include:

- Icing smoother, or in other words, a thin metal spatula. This valuable tool will allow you to cover your cake with flat, even layers of icing so that it's smooth and ready to be decorated. Using this correctly will make your cake look professionally made.

- Decoration molds. These will help you easily and quickly make objects or figures. Begin with some basics like circles and triangles, until your confident with your ability to not mess it up. After circles and squares, try out numbers, characters or flowers.

- Icing bags. These are vital to cake decorating! Once you get the hang of it, (will happen quickly) you'll be using it just like an ink pen. The only difference will be the icing bag is held with both hands, and you cant sign a check with it. One hands used to administer pressure on the top half of the bag, while your lower guides the tips decorations.

- Ready made frosting flowers quickly add beauty to the cake while being ridiculously simple to use.

- Colorful glitter and edible sprinkles bring out the child in anyone, and they are an easy way to shape up your design.

- Edible color sprays are simple to utilize and can add a lot of decorative pizazz to your cake.

- Edible Photographs. The paper that these images are printed on is edible, so you can just throw the whole thing on the cake and not think twice. No hassle, no fuss, just a fantastic photograph. Maybe throw on a picture for your 110 year old grandmother of when she was 60, or a photograph of the wedding couple for their anniversary.

A cake stand makes your cake stand out above the rest, literally and figuratively. If you use a glass stand, your decoration will take the cake every time.

Learn more about Cake Decorating. Stop by Randy Pryor's site where you can find out all about Cake Decorating Techniques and what they can do for you.

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