Hand Painted Wedding Cake: Behind the Scenes, Painting with Buttercream

Keep reading to see how I made this hand painted wedding cake using buttercream as the “paint”!

Growing up I loved to dabble in cake decorating. When going to the grocery store with my mom, I’d often stop in the cake supplies aisle and just look through the Wilton cake decorating magazines while she did the actual shopping, haha.

Then after graduating from culinary school, I made a couple of wedding cakes for some friends. But then I had kids and all of that kind of fell by the wayside…. Which was actually totally fine because making wedding cakes is a lot of pressure, haha!

Now I only make wedding cakes for my sisters (I don’t have any brothers, but if I did I suppose I’d make some for them, too 😉 ). It’s actually really fun and for years I’ve kept a Pinterest board that I add cake ideas to whenever I happen to come across ones that remind me of each specific sister.

A few years ago I saw a cake that looked like an oil painting and I immediately pegged it as inspiration for my oldest sister! We were both very into the arts and humanities in high school and had prints of famous paintings decorating our rooms. We were even lucky enough to take a trip to Europe together with our humanities class and get to see many of the amazing artworks we’d studied in real life!

I definitely associate classic art, particularly oil paintings, with my older sister. I’ve been hoping for the last couple of years that she’d still have a love for paintings and want a painted wedding cake whenever she got married. I didn’t tell her that, of course—it would be her wedding, after all.

Then when she got engaged last year (to an amazing guy, by the way 😊) and we were going over cake ideas, she loved the idea of a painted cake right away! I was so excited, haha!

She decided on plum and peach colored flowers, so I got some new food colorings, a palette knife, and got ready to paint like I’d never painted before! Literally, haha!

I used a classic vanilla buttercream as my “paint” and it was really a fun experience.

This isn’t an in-depth tutorial so much as it a walk-through, but I’ll include a few tips that I learned along the way.

You may be interested in my recipe for rich and moist dark chocolate hazelnut cake.

Tips for Making a Painted Wedding Cake

• The first thing that helped keep this process smooth was only painting on the cakes once they’d been refrigerated long enough for the base layer of buttercream to be hard.

• Then I learned that using a palette knife (you can find them for cheap on Amazon) worked a lot better than a paintbrush, for the kind of look I was going for, at least.

• I also discovered that the frosting colors darkened after resting for a day, so I didn’t dye them as dark as I needed to start with. Also, I was super impressed with how vibrant these dyes turned the buttercream! Seriously, I highly recommend them (you can find them on Amazon, too).

• It’s a good idea to keep the bowls of buttercream covered unless you’re actually using it. Otherwise, the top layer will form a crust.

• I found using separate plates for each color of buttercream– with a few shades on each plate– worked better than having them all on one “palette.”

• This last tip doesn’t really affect the outcome so much, but I did find it helped to paint the largest cake tier first. It can take quite a while, so mentally, it’s nice to always have a little less work to do on the next tier. 😉

Picture time!

And now for some pictures of the process!

So what do you think of a hand-painted wedding cake? What would you like to see painted on a cake? The possibilities are endless! Let me know your ideas in the comments!