A homemade cake baked with your own hands can be made original and unusual using a topper. Such apex ornaments are sold in a wide range today. These can be letters, figures of people, swans, etc. The topper can be ordered or bought in a pastry shop, or made by hand.
Top decorations for cakes are made by confectioners from different materials. It can be designer cardboard, colored acrylic, food grade plastic. At home, housewives often make toppers from colored mastic.
How to choose
Of course, choosing a topper is, of course, first of all necessary, taking into account what kind of celebration the cake is baked or purchased for. For newlyweds, for example, silhouette apical decorations are very popular.
An obligatory element of the wedding cake is the silhouette of lovers with swans or doves. Also, congratulatory inscriptions with hearts, made in a beautiful ornate font, are often installed on such cakes.
If the cake was baked for a child's birthday, it can be decorated with figurines of fairy-tale animals, cartoon characters, flags, balls. For anniversary cakes, toppers are usually chosen in the form of congratulatory inscriptions with the corresponding numbers.
Promotion of a position, rank or business success can be noted with a cake decorated with a topper, indicating the characteristics of the profession. For the military, these can be flags, emblems, stars. A cake baked for a representative of the creative profession can be decorated with a book, musical instrument, etc.
How to make a topper: cartoon characters
A ready-made topper, which can be ordered at any nearby pastry shop, will look very impressive on the cake, of course. However, such jewelry is, unfortunately, quite expensive. For a simple homemade cake baked for tea, making a topper, of course, is best done with your own hands. You can use ordinary mastic for this purpose.
If there is a small child in the house, you can decorate the cake, for example, with cartoon mastic characters. In this case, in addition to soft fruit or nut mastic, you will need to purchase waffle paper.
The first thing to do to make such a topper is to find vivid pictures of the corresponding topic on the Internet. Found cartoons then need to be printed on wafer paper.
The selected bright pictures in the next step are simply carefully cut out with scissors. Since animations usually have a complex shape, it is better to cut them arbitrarily with a small indent from the outline.
In the mastic mass itself, you need to add a little SMS - a special confectionery powder. This ingredient will add a little stiffness to the mass.
To prepare mastic toppers at the next stage, you need to roll balls and break them into cakes with a thickness of 5 mm. Next, a cartoon figure should be attached to each cake and the mastic should be cut along its contour.
You can fix the picture on a mastic base using, for example, honey diluted with a small amount of water. On the cake itself, the toppers made in this way will be easy to install using ordinary wooden skewers.
Additionally, you can decorate a cake with such a topper using, for example, sprinkles or grated chocolate. For the best effect, it is worth sticking flat figures of mastic on the sides of the cake - stars, flowers, Christmas trees. To make such elements, the mastic is rolled out in a very thin layer, and the figures themselves are cut out using metal molds.
