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Candies and other edible foodstuffs provide limitless possibilities for making cakes fun and festive — whether your goal is to fashion a totally edible experience for your guests or simply to get creative with your decorating.
Simple but sublime options
The easiest and most common decorations are sparkles, nonpareils, and jimmies (sprinkles) — they jazz up a cake in a jiffy. But rather than just scatter them on top, give some form and function to your decoration by placing them inside a cookie cutter, pressing them into the sides of the cake, or using them to fill in a design. You also can use them to highlight or outline other designs.
Candies
In addition to adding color and interest to your cake, candies are great for spelling out numbers and names, or you can reinvent them as all sorts of objects and object parts. Consider these different applications of easy-to-find candies:
- Peppermints can be pinwheels.
- Gumdrops can be little caps and hats, blinking lights, or the centers of flowers. You can also roll them out and cut or form them into different shapes.
- Necco wafers can be a mermaid's scales or roof tiles on house.
- Jawbreakers can be beach balls.
- Whips or shoestring licorice can be animal whiskers, railroad tracks, or eyelashes.
- Jelly beans can be jewelry. They look especially good as the gemstone in a frosting ring or pendants on a necklace.
 | For a lot of cake designs, you don't need much candy to get the right look. If that's the case for your design, visit a bulk candy store to get just a few pieces of a favorite treat or just pick up the small packages or boxes of candy in a grocery store's check-out aisle. |
Confections
In addition to candy, a plethora of other sweets offer a variety of options for your cake decorating adventures. Consider these possibilities for a scene or object you're trying to create:
- Marshmallows can be pillows or soapsuds.
- Squares of gum can be floor tiles or bases on a baseball field.
- Wafer rolls can be fences.
- Doughnuts can be tires or inner tubes.
- Cotton candy can be clouds or a ballerina's tutu.
- Crushed cookies can be dirt, sand, a racetrack, or a ball field.
- Coconut can be unruly hair (if it's tinted) or snow (if it's not).
- Fruit-striped gum can be fashioned into surfboards, snowboards, skis, pennants, and license plates.
Other treats
Don't stop at the stuff you find only in the sweet shop. The supermarket is overflowing with opportunities to craft and create. Consider these ideas:
- Ice cream cones can be castles, princess hats, or cornucopia shapes.
- Pretzel sticks can be ladders or flag poles.
- Graham teddy bears and animal crackers add a lively animal presence to a scene.
- Raw sugar or brown sugar can be a beach shore.
- Flavored gelatin can be pool water (blue) or lava running down the side of a mountain (red).
- Fruit tape can be fashioned into a pet's collar, a necklace, or leather straps on a treasure chest.
| Try to look at candy and foodstuffs differently. You never know what could become the shape or foundation for a cake design you're working on! |
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