Free Video Tip: Adorn Your Cakes with Pearl Bursts

Enjoy this tip? Learn more about Marina Sousa’s online cake decorating class, Jeweled Wedding Cake.

Video transcript:

Hi, I’m Marina Sousa, instructor of Jeweled Wedding Cake at Bluprint.com. I’m going to share with you just one of the elements that we’re going to be covering in my new course, Jeweled Wedding Cake. These are just fun, little pearl bursts, as I call them. They work great for whimsical wedding cakes, but they’re also really fun to do on any kind of celebration cake or birthday cake, just as a little extra burst of fun.

So really it’s easy as taking a piece of gum paste, and rolling it out so you’ve got little pieces. Then roll it between your hands just to make a ball shape. Doesn’t have to be perfect because these are going to be dipped in some coating chocolate and then rolled in the pearls.

So we’ve got a few here. Okay, now I’m attaching them to fun, decorative wire. This is a floral product. It’s called diamond wire. And I’m just going to cut a couple lengths of that. We’re going to dip the ends of our wire into some white coating chocolate. Stick it in the end of a couple of our balls. Now you can just wait for these to dry; or to speed up the process, we can use a little freeze spray, which just requires a little zap, and it hardens it up very quickly for us.

Okay, I’m clearing some of this away.

Now we simply take one of the balls that is attached to the end of our wire, we’ve melted some coating chocolate, and we’re just going to kind of let that swim around in there. Tap the chocolate off. Now waiting, I have some sugar pearls that I have put some disco dust in so they’re nice and sparkly. I’m going take the ball with the coating chocolate on it, and just roll it around in here. And I need to just adjust them a little bit—the ones that have clumped on each other.

And now you have a fun little burst that you can attach to the top of any cake. You can certainly color the pearls and create any color you’d like. I had a couple little bald spots so I just dabbed my finger in some chocolate and reattached those pearls. And all you have to do is stick them in some styrofoam, let them dry, and you can have them adorn any cake that you make.

So just a quick overview. Roll your gum paste balls. You can also use some styrofoam balls. If you’re going to be using something up really high and are worried about the weight, these styrofoam guys work great. Same process: stick the wire, dip them in chocolate, roll them around in pearls, and there you go.

If you’d like to learn more about wedding cakes, take my course Jeweled Wedding Cake on Bluprint.com