Cake Decoration Tips - Cake decorating tools

Hi, I'm Karen for Expert Village. You'll need some plastic bags or plastic wrap to keep your prepared fondants moist, not dry. A ruler is handy to have for measuring and keeping things straight if you want to do straight cuts. A rolling pin. It's handy to have a small rolling pin and a large rolling pin. When you're covering the cake, you'll want the large rolling pin and when you're doing small decorations, you'll want the small rolling pin. This particular one I picked up in a craft shop for rolling out clay and stuff, but it works great for the fondant. This is a tool that they use to smooth the fondants and you'll find that in the cake decoration center of any craft store or where ever they sell cake decorating supplies. It's not necessary, but it's a very handy tool. So I added it here. Some spatulas are nice to have to help placement or picking up the fondant. Those come in handy too. An assortment of cookie cutters are great to have. Flowers, stars, any kind of shapes that you like. I picked these heart ones to use today. You'll want some food coloring to color your fondant. Fondant comes white. And you add food colors to color it. I don't recommend using the liquid colors that you find in the grocery stores because they'll moisten the fondant too much and make it sticky and hard to work with. These are paste colors. And toothpicks are for putting the color into the fondant, which you'll see. We'll also be using confectioner's sugar , which we use to dust the board when rolling so the fondant doesn't get sticky. You'll need some, this is shortening. A vegetable shortening or a margarine. It's better to have it without color, so if you're choosing a margarine, choose one that is pretty colorless. Not one that's dyed yellow a lot. Because you'll use that to soften the fondant. Sometimes the fondant gets too dry and you want to soften it. Plus you'll see how we use it as we go. And finally water is important to have. A little bit of water and we use this as glue. When you're sticking flowers or shapes or your design elements onto each other, you just use a tiny bit of water to stick the pieces together. I think we've covered everything and now we're ready to get started.