Ready to dive into the newest buttercream trend? Go beyond buttercream flowers and create a garden of lifelike succulents and cacti! Cake designer Liz Shim shows you how to create realistic buttercream succulents and cacti to arrange on cakes, cupcakes, and more. With Liz’s step-by-step guidance, you’ll master a variety of new techniques for piping lifelike plants and creating earthy tones in buttercream.
Meet Liz Shim and follow along as she demonstrates a quick and simple buttercream recipe. Then, dive into coloring as Liz shares how to mix earthy greens and purples. She also covers ways to mute brighter, artificial looking color. After that, find out how to fill your piping bag and create variegated colors for a dual-tone effect.
Learn different techniques for piping succulents as well as how to avoid common mistakes. If you get lost, you can always rewatch the techniques until you get them right.
Get started on your first project: a succulent glass terrarium. Discover how to make "dirt" from chocolate cake, and green "moss" from graham crackers. Then, arrange the dirt, moss and succulents in your terrarium.
Move on to cacti as you learn a variety of techniques to pipe these prickly plants. After that, troubleshoot common mistakes for each style of plant. Plus, practice your buttercream blooms by piping flowering cacti.
Liz guides you through your third project: Potted terracotta cactus cupcakes. Start by making "sand" with graham crackers or brown sugar. Then, cut the cupcakes in half, and layer them with buttercream and edible sand in food-safe pots. Arrange the cacti on top of the potted cupcakes and mix in some succulents to finish them up.
Finish class by arranging your cacti and succulents on a naked cake. Liz explains how to use ground peanuts as pebbles to naturally decorate empty space, and confidently incorporate desert plants of different shapes and sizes.
Liz Shim
Liz Shim discovered her love of edible art as a teenager and went on to graduate from the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu program at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. Today, Liz is the owner and head designer of Eat Cake Be Merry, a cake studio serving the New York City area. Her work has been featured in magazines such as Brides, The Knot, People and Martha Stewart Weddings. Liz's cakes also have been named America's Most Beautiful Cakes by Brides magazine on multiple occasions, and she's been named one of Martha Stewart Weddings' Top Pastry Pros in America.
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