Anyone can make a plain party cake into something special for teens or kids with delicious and colorful candy. These unique ideas for decorating cakes are good for beginners or even children to try. Boys and girls of all ages love awesome or pretty celebration cakes.
Using candy to create designs makes cake decorating quick, easy and delicious. Most regular grocery stores or supermarkets will have everything needed. This saves money over buying an expensive custom cake, special supplies, or taking cake-decorating classes. It also eliminates the need for tubes of decorating icing and professional supplies.
Ideas for Using Candy to Decorate Cakes
A few tricks for using various specific candies include the following:
- Gummi peach or apple rings make cute candle holders or vehicle tires
- Thin red licorice whips can be used for forming letters, for outlines, or as rope (as in a western design)
- Mini M&Ms placed in a circle around candles work with a sweet and simple flower motif
- Regular M&Ms or any other round candy make fun flowers by circling a yellow middle with different colored round "petals"
- Banana Runts are tiny banana shapes and can be used for bird claws, bird beaks, or bug legs
- Junior Mints are round chocolate-covered mints. They are flat on the bottom and make good polka-dots or eyes
- Jelly Fruit Slices come in yellow, orange, red or green and make cute smiles, dinosaur spikes, or edging around the top or bottom of a cake
- Dots are colorful round-topped cones that make fun clown or animal noses or red and green emergency vehicle “lights”
- Pop Rocks give good texture and are fun to eat as they sizzle and pop
If a cake is for one particular person, adding several of their favorite candies is a nice surprise.
How to Mold Shapes with Soft Candy
Tootsie Rolls, Starburst, caramels, or other flexible candy can be molded (with freshly washed hands, of course) just like modeling clay. It is great fun to mold edible animals, vehicles, jewels, bugs, flowers or other items to be placed on the cake as decorations. Tootsie Roll and Starburst candies come in various colors and flavors.
Some candy is easily flattened with fingers or a rolling pin and can be cut with cookie cutters. The possibilities are endless.
Simple Cake Top Decorations
Simple coloring book pages or online printables make great guides to follow. Many preschool aged pages are available with holiday outlines such as fall leaves, wreaths, Christmas items, hearts, flowers, and country flags. The parts of a design can be filled in with any desired candies, such as Skittles, Smarties, colored sprinkles (from the cake decorating section of the store), or just about any candy the right size and color for the design.
Polka-dot cakes are a breeze using round, flat colorful candies like Spree, Sweet Tarts, and Necco Wafers.
A striped cake is easy to make using Fruit-by-the-Foot and Fruit Roll-Ups (as well as other similar flat fruit candies) to create stripes across a cake, either horizontal, vertical or diagonal.
More Cake Decorating Ideas
Cute edible cake decorations don’t have to be expensive or require skill, and can still look masterful. A little stroll down the candy isle of the grocery store is enough inspiration for decorating any cake!
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Resources:
- Some decorating ideas from Kelsey Jennrich, personal interview, July 5, 2010
- All candy brand names are trademarks of their respective manufacturers.
Note: Please keep in mind choking hazards for small children when determining what candy to use on a cake.
Janienne Jennrich - Janienne Jennrich, Topic Editor for Kids & Teen Parties and for Hair, is an award-winning freelance writer & webmaster.
