CakeBoss Coral Cake Decor Tutorial

Step 1: Eat some grapes.

You'll want to acquire some grape stems of various sizes. This technique is slightly more effective if you let them dry for a day or two so they don't bend while you're working with them, but it's not necessary.

Make royal icing.

Start by making royal icing. Royal icing is simply powdered sugar, meringue powder, and water. It increases in volume as it's whipped. When it dries, it becomes almost rock-hard, and because of this, it is useful in hundreds of ways in the sugar arts. As with most things, it's best made in a stand mixer.

Royal icing after 8 minutes in the mixer.

Stiff royal icing ready for use.

Applying icing to grape stems.

Today I'm making orange, yellow, and white coral, but the color possibilities are endless! Coral exists in all kinds of brilliant colors - yellow, orange, blue, purple, fuchsia, white. The sky's the limit as far as your color selection.

Round tips anywhere from size 5-8 are good for this job.

Begin using your piping bag to apply icing to the stem. We're not going for full coverage, just cover as much as you can before it gets goopy and hard to hold.

Stopping point.

When you've covered as much as you can, stop piping and let the stems dry for several hours or overnight. You want the icing to become hard enough so that you can pick it up without it smudging.

Base layer drying.

Piping bag care.

You can cover the tips of your piping bags with wet paper towels to keep them from getting hard and crusty while you wait. *A note about letting royal icing sit: after a few hours it starts to take on an almost marshmallowy consistency, with air bubbles throughout. Under normal circumstances, you would always re-whip royal icing before you use it. But for coral, the air bubbles actually enhance the look, so I just leave it in the bag and use it as-is.

Final coverage.

After the first layer of royal icing has dried hard enough so that you can pick up the stems without smudging or breaking it, you're going to go back over the stem with your piping tip, piping over all the spots that you missed the first time. There is no science to the placement of the icing! Coral is organic, weird, bumpy, and random - so your grape stem coral can be, too!

Finished pieces.

Allow to dry completely.

Optional: Luster dust.

I happen to be of the opinion that there isn't much that can't be made better with a little pearl or luster dust, so after the second coat of royal icing dries, I dust my coral with matching dust - in this case, Gold Pearl for the white and orange, and basic yellow luster dust for the yellow corals. (The brush is a cosmetics brush that I use exclusively for decorating.

Voila!

That's it! This coral is destined for this cute and whimsical ocean cake.