How to Make Realistic Fruit Cakes with Professional Decorating Secrets

welcome back to how to cake it this week I want to talk about how to bring fruits to life as you know I'm a big fan of fruits and caking fruits and so I want to go over some of the key elements that will really help you in your cake decorating I also think they're great because you can easily impart the flavors of a fruit into your cake as well sry vegetables that's not true of you so first up to bat is giant strawberry cake this was a highly requested cake actually it wasn't until I said to myself on the Channel that I should cake a strawberry and then it became highly requested and when people think of strawberries what do we think of a nice ripe juicy red strawberry we definitely think of the seeds which I

learned are ovaries and then we think of like its crowning Glory I actually like the crown I think it's like a perfect handle I don't remember if I did a strawberry simple syrup but you can definitely do a strawberry simple syrup and you can definitely make a strawberry buttercream by puring strawberries straining it and using the really thick puree to flavor your buttercream and then you can further enhance it with food coloring because it won't be as red or as Pink as you want it to be after you shape your strawberry the next most important thing obviously is the color of the fondant I get upset when I buy strawberries and they're still white you know what I'm saying you know when they haven't like ripened and

I get so annoyed it's not the strawberry's fault it's the strawberry picker's fault okay so number one have a model if you're trying to mimic something you always want to have a model so go out and find perfect strawberries and have them beside you when you're coloring fondant number two always keep in mind that food coloring is very literal meaning you know when you use red it's a red right whereas colors in nature are very nuanced so get a bunch of different Reds have food coloring that can change the tone of the red like Ivory which will warm it up or like green which will help it uh become dull since it's the opposite of red on the color wheel um and then also I would say use the color in two ways so with

the strawberry not only did I color the fondant but after the fact I painted the fondant because fondant is very matte it looks like Play-Doh and that's not what a strawberry looks like so even though I'm covering the strawberry in colored fondant you also want to paint that fondant when I used to make cakes in my mother's kitchen it was yellow and it was very sunny which is beautiful if you're making your morning coffee and you're having dinner but when you're coloring fondant that Hue projects onto everything so I remember I'd have a really hard time the light surrounding the room would trick my eye so when I built my kitchen in the basement it was entirely white this cake is a bit tricky

cuz not only do I have to paint it but I have to add all those seeds or ovaries so the most tedious part is making all of the seeds and truthfully like if I was making a wedding cake and I had decorations to add I would make them all ahead of time with novelty cakes what's hard is I could have made all the seeds ahead of time and then by the time I shaped my cake iced it covered it realized they're too big or too small and now I have to do it again so with novelty I tend to like to wait till that stage so you can't just buy no you wouldn't believe it you can't buy giant strawberry seeds anywhere and you know what I contemplated using pine nuts cuz they're very similar in shape but they

honestly when I stared at the strawberries they aren't yellow enough to make the crown I used green gum paste and once again same like the seeds if I made this ahead of time I wouldn't know if it was the right and so having the cake in front of me I was able to make a template so I basically made a paper template that looked like a big flower so I used that template to cut out my gumpaste once it's rolled out painted the surface painted underneath a bit so with the body of the strawberry strawberries are shiny or they're they have moisture so I choose to use wet paint so I dilute gel color in food coloring and paint if I wanted the item to be shiny like let's say it was something artificial or plastic that's

really shiny and colored I would add piping gel to that same mixture and that would ensure that the sheen stayed the way it is even when the paint dries and then color dust is when the item is matte so even though the strawberry has a lot of moisture its leaves don't read the same right like they read more they're not dried but they're definitely more matte and they also have a bit of texture and so by dry brushing you get all of the above then of course I made a stem I love when I buy strawberries and I get one with a stem I don't know why it makes me feel special the next cake I want to talk about is the most obvious and of course he petitioned his way into this video he

thinks he's the number one fruit so it is Walter the watermelon cake this was a cake I daydreamed about before the channel and when we first started the channel I really wanted to make it I love it because it's decorated inside and out so the inside is pink velvet cake I dye the buttercream the same color and then there's chocolate chips for the seeds I think that's why this cake is so stunning like it's not the hardest cake on the channel at all with Walter the most important part is the painting definitely in this case think you need a model so pick up a watermelon you know make your cake shape it cover it in white fondant the other thing is this is one of the only cakes I'm pretty

sure I'm right where the fondant is intentionally thicker here it's thicker because when you cut into a watermelon you see that white rind and so I feel like there's comments on this that are like the fondant is thick but it has to be it would not look like a watermelon if I cut it and there was nothing between you know what have you ever had pickled watermelon rind once again just like strawberry you want to have a bunch of different greens you want to have some Ivory to warm it up you want to have some in this case it's the opposite some red to dull it down because they're opposite colors and take your time and build the color strawberry it was just one coating of red this is about

layering and building because a straw a watermelon almost looks striped so you're not going to do that in one shot we're going to paint the base color of the watermelon first and let it dry watermelon is a combination of a lighter green and a darker green so we start with the lighter shade of green first we go back with the darker shade I like to work on sort of the stripes first but they're not literal Stripes right imperfect naturally occurring Stripes paint the stripe on and let gravity pull the stripe down the cake and then work out each stripe by stiffling because if all you do is make brush Strokes that's not going to look like a watermelon and then of course a nub

strawberry has a crown a watermelon has a nub but always remember to add that part to make it look more realistic I was nice to Walter okay because every watermelon I've ever bought has like a yellow flat spot at some point cuz where it sits on the ground I didn't I made him perfect he's an Immaculate watermelon dragon fruit this was on my bucket list for a long time but this like turkey was a cake and I'm saying I'm talking like it was one it was two dragon fruits this was a cake that while I was making it I was thinking why did I want to make this so for this cake I mean there's other fruit cakes where matching the color of the fruit is very important this is always true in this case I had to figure

out what the seeds could be chocolate chips won't work they're too big I went to my local bulk store and they had black sesame seeds so even though I know that the seeds in the dragon fruit are quite round I knew that it wouldn't really read and it would just look seedy which is what I was going for that was hurdle number one the shape is relatively simple because the main part of the dragon fruit is like a rounder ball where all the you know when you cut it open you can actually physically see so I wanted the cake to also mimic that next upep was dying the fondant to match uh dragon fruit skin which again is part of making any fruit cake because in this case it's more like strawberry I need

the base color and I'll add paint later it's not like watermelon where the skin entirely comes from painting then I had to cover each one of my cakes that were now formed like a ball filled with buttercream to match the cake and the good thing about this is normally it's hard to get a sphere covered perfectly smooth because no matter what a lot of excess fondant is going to gather down around the bottom and it takes time to work it out but dragon fruits are quite I don't want to say wrinkly but there's texture in the skin and it kind of overlaps it almost looks like it's been folded so that made my job covering it easier now here's where it got tricky and here's where I started to regret my

choice the skin seems to have I won't even call them leaves what are they called horns I have no IDE maybe they are horns they're dragons when I'm making a cake like this I start to feel defeated so I just had to do it step by step I couldn't really calculate in my head how it was going to work out so again this is why it's so important to have a model and I would just roll more of the fuchsia colored fondant create the strips as it gets down to the bottom of the dragon fruit those strips get thicker and kind of stick out so I used a hexagon cutter to mimic the natural pattern and I just kept adding to the dragon fruit until it looked the way I wanted it to look it's time to add the green parts to the dragon fruit the tips and the parts

that extend out of the opening I dyed some gumpaste a nice light green cut out petals and to cut out all the little horns and what's interesting is the horns kind of like protrude that's a word like they stick right out so I ended up making slits in the cake and putting folded paper in the slip because as soon as fondant is exposed to air it begins to dry on the surface so what I was afraid of is letting that fondant dry and later on making slits and then that would cause cracks and wrinkles and elephant skin in the fondant but before I added the green Parts I did something on a fruit that I haven't had to do with any other fruit seam hiding you take some of the same

fondant you use to cover the cake and then you thin it out with a spatula and clear food grate alcohol and what you basically do is just pour enough alcohol on and painted it into the gaps and grooves where the fondant meets each other cuz even though there is that pattern there's no actual Gap or seam that's just the way it grows see I again paint the whole surface of this just to give it a little bit of a Sheen and then I have to paint all the green leaves cuz again it has a base color just like strawberry I'm painting the leaves with dry dust and the leaves actually get a bit pink in the middle so again the model really helps so you can get all those extra details and make it look real

and then what I really loved about the dragon fruit I've made a lot of Nubs but this nub is pretty special it looks almost floral it had a definite pattern I feel like I nailed the color of the inner flesh I nailed the color of the outside and the leaf but I knew that when I cut the cake as satisfying as it was going to be it wasn't going to be wet enough on the surface cuz the dragon fruit on the inside is like a watermelon like it's very wet so I took a moment before we shot the final pictures to ice a thin layer of clear piping gel on the surface of the cut one so I hope these tips on bringing fruits to life have really helped you know be open-minded play around with food coloring piping gel color dust even

fondant paste when it's necessary leave a comment below let me know which one of these fruits is your favorite and leave me a comment what the next fruit I cake should be I will see you next week