This easy tutorial shows you how to hand paint beautiful floral art onto a cake using buttercream frosting, palette knives, and paint brushes! This simple cake decorating technique is perfect for your next birthday party or wedding, bridal, or baby shower!

How to Paint a Cake with Buttercream

Painted cakes are so hot right now! It’s actually a lot easier than it seems and really easy to do once you get the hang of it. It’s a great way to turn any cake into a pretty floral dessert that looks much more difficult than it is.

Type of frosting for Painting a cake

For painting a cake with buttercream frosting, use any type of light colored buttercream. For this cake I used Swiss American Buttercream frosting but you can also use American Buttercream. To mix the colors, I used a cookie sheet flipped upside down. Then I put about ½ -¾ cup frosting for each color and then a few drops of food coloring and mixed with a cake spatula. I like this because it was easy to move around and you can easily use the palette knife to mix and scrape the frosting. But you can also use a plate or bowl to mix your colors.

Practice Painting with Buttercream

A big tip for making your own palette knife cake is to practice your design before you go to your cake. For this cake, I sketched out some flowers and practiced on food grade acetate paper, but you can also practice on parchment or wax paper, or a plate. Basically any flat surface will do.

It took a few tries before I got flowers I liked:

For this pink floral cake I used this palette knife kit but you can use any palate knives you want. I used the round palette knife for the petals and the smallest knife for the stems and big leaves. I used paint brushes for the detail leaves on the top of the cake. To color the buttercream, I used a tiny bit of rose pink for the petals and leaf green and forest green for the leaves and stems.

Here are some other buttercream flower designs I tried:

When you’re ready to paint your cake, make sure you are starting with a cake that is fully frosted and chilled. You want the frosted cake to be very hard so it’s easy to paint on. You can not paint on a cake that is frosted with a soft frosting like whipped cream or 7 minute frosting. But, you can paint directly on a cake covered in fondant or marzipan.

Tools for a Cake Painting:

Once you’ve painted your frosting design you can use sanding sugar, sugar pearls, or other fun cake decorations like sprinkles or gold leaf foil sheets. For this cake, I use yellow and white sanding sugar, with white sugar pearls. Some of the sugar pearls I covered in edible gold luster dust.

Optional Cake Decorations:

Tips for cake painting with buttercream

Start with a fully frosted and very well chilled cake. If the frosted cake is soft, it’s more difficult to paint. You can also paint on a fondant or marzipan covered cake.
Sketch out a design and practice on a flat surface before you go right to painting your cake.
If the cake starts to get soft before you’re done painting, put it back in the fridge for 20-30 minutes to firm up.
Use tweezers to get any sprinkles, sugar pearls, or other decorations exactly where you want them.

Using this palette knife cake decorating technique is a fun and easy way to decorate a cake for parties and events. Try it at your next birthday party, bachelorette party, wedding or bridal shower!

Other cakes using the same palette knife buttercream painting technique:

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pink flowers painted in buttercream on cake

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