Achieve A Ruffled Ombre Look With This Cake Piping Trick

You don't need to be a professional baker to expertly decorate a cake. There are cake techniques perfect for beginners, and you don't even need to know how to bake a cake to make one that looks like it came from a fancy bakery. Depending on the design you are creating, you can start with a standard grocery store frosted cake and simply swipe off the excess decoration, leaving you with an already done crumb coating. Whether you're making it or buying it, once the cake is stacked and frosted in a light layer of frosting, you can get to work designing a masterpiece fit for a display case.

One of the popular cake trends that looks difficult but isn't is an ombre ruffle cake. Just like the name implies, this cake looks like it's wearing a ruffle skirt with a cascading color pattern of light to dark. Before you even begin decorating, you'll need some tools to step up your cake-decorating game. To create a ruffled ombre look, you'll need one large piping bag, a 1M open star piping tip, and some buttercream frosting. You'll need to use a knife to section off the cake and mark where you will pipe your ruffles. The easy trick is piping one flat line, then continuing with a scalloped line all the way up the cake.

A scalloped line or edge just means that there is a curve, which is achieved by piping in an up-and-down motion from one section to the next. The look almost mimics a curtain and is even more dramatic with an ombre pattern. In one viral post from @saucybakes, white buttercream is used as the base and gets tinted with various shades of pink, from hot pink all the way to very pale pink. She creates two rows of one color, then lightens each of the rows as she pipes to the top. Any color or combination of colors could be used, you'll just need your preferred food coloring.

Once you get comfortable with the scallop pattern, you can add different types of buttercream ruffles by using different piping tips. Instead of creating a horizontal pattern, you can use a petal tip to ice the cake vertically, creating a unique three-dimensional ribbon look. If you're going to spend a good chunk of time perfecting your piping, you'll want to know the easy trick to piping like a pro. While it may seem counterintuitive, you never want too much filling in your piping bag. If you run low, you can always add more — it's better to pause for more frosting than to accidentally ruin your neat handiwork with a glob of buttercream that ends up where it shouldn't.