Not many hobbies can give you as much joy and pleasure as cake decorating. The look you see on the faces of your friends and neighbors when they see the work of art you have just presented them is priceless. Then, assuming you have done everything else right, the accolades you get from them as their taste buds explode with the wonderful flavors you have so skillfully blended together, is like music to your ears. It can make all that time and frustration you have spent on learning this skill all worthwhile.

While it can take a little time to learn how to do cake decorating, it is not as hard as you may imagine. With all the free resources you can explore and learn from online, with just a little bit of time and perseverance, you could be churning out very good looking designs very quickly. Just start with the basic cakes and mixes and as you learn more start to tackle the multi-tiered cakes and the other complexities of cake decorating.

Don’t get me wrong; to be a true cake decorating artist you will have a lot to learn. From baking and leveling the cakes to filling and frosting them, it will take a lot of practice to become truly proficient at decorating cakes. In between you have other methods to learn to become skillful at creating beautiful and unique cakes.

Skills like making and applying fondant, molding chocolate, making and coloring lifelike sugar paste flowers and hand piping all kinds of different shapes and lettering. Not to mention the more advanced skills like blowing crystal clear sugar into un-imaginable shapes and configurations.

But you will have fun…and you get to eat your mistakes!

Just a little recommendation though, start small. Get a Duncan Hines cake mix, make a 9 x 13 rectangle cake or an 8 or 9 inch round and do a simple frosted icing cake with some simple lettering or fluted borders and stars for basic decoration to learn the piping techniques. After you get confident at simple icing skills, move to making and applying a fondant for your cake covering and try some more advanced tips for piping.

Believe me, people will love your starter cakes and will praise you as you get more and more adventurous and creative with later projects. After all they will still taste great and who doesn’t like cake?

Another thing you will run into is accumulating all the tools and equipment you will need as you advance in your cake decorating hobby. I found a great Cake Decorating supplies place at Cake Decorating Central. Check it out and see what you think. Especially check out their page for Cake Decorating Kits where you can get most of the tools you will use in one kit so you don’t have to keep buying items as you discover you need them.

Just remember you are in this to have fun, don’t sweat the small stuff. If you make a mistake just eat the result and get new ingredients and try again.

When I started out decorating cakes I found many online resources and spent a lot of time looking at different sites, but then I found Cake Decorating Central and I had all the learning and supply resources in one place.