Bring Your Cake To Life With This 2-Ingredient Decorating Trick

Many decorating tricks for jazzing up the appearance of your cake require special equipment or ingredients — rotating turntables for achieving super-smooth icing, fondant molded into intricate figurines, meringue topping that's been heated with a blowtorch until it's the perfect shade of toasted brown. However, there's a two-ingredient trick that will instantly level up your cake with almost no effort at all. Even better, those two ingredients are ones you can find at just about any grocery store (or perhaps even have on hand in your pantry already).

To start, all you need to do is melt some chocolate. There are a few different ways to melt chocolate, from the classic double boiler technique to simply tossing it in the microwave for short bursts — use whatever your preferred method is. Then, transfer your melted chocolate to some kind of vessel that allows you to pipe it. Instagram user @mrshollingsworths kept it simple when demonstrating this trick and used a squeeze bottle with a narrow tip, but you could opt for a piping bag or even just a disposable zip-top bag with a small hole cut in one corner.

Finally, fill a bowl with sprinkles. Then, all you need to do is use your chocolate to pipe designs or letters or numbers atop the sprinkles, wait for it to harden, and remove your sprinkle-encrusted chocolate cake decoration from the bowl to position it atop your cake.

The great thing about this particular tip is that it's endlessly customizable, making it perfect for everything from a colorful, whimsical children's birthday cake to an elegant cake for a more sophisticated event. First of all, you can melt practically any kind of chocolate you want. In a poll conducted by Mashed, 56% of the people surveyed favored milk chocolate, so that's a good default option. For a fun rosy-pink hue, try melting ruby chocolate, or if you're attempting to balance out a cake that's on the sweeter side or topped with buttercream, consider the hint of bitterness that dark chocolate can offer.

You can also swap out the sprinkles for anything that can be crushed into a fine texture. Crushed nuts pair naturally with chocolate (a Nutella cake would be incredible with a chocolate-and-crushed-hazelnut topper, for example), but you could use toasted shredded coconut for a tropical twist, crushed peppermint for a holiday spin, or even gold nonpareils for a more understated topper.

If you have a particular color in mind, you can even make homemade sprinkles that are the exact shades you want, though that would make this trick a bit more labor-intensive. And, if letters or numbers aren't the cake toppers you had in mind, or you aren't particularly artistic and able to come up with stunning designs, go for a more abstract approach and just pipe some squiggles or shapes.