Sprinkles are colourful and fun but there is SO much more that you can do than just sprinkling them onto a cake! Decorate professional looking cakes with these 5 sprinkle cake hacks. If you prefer to watch a video of this tutorial, scroll to the bottom of the page.
Sprinkle Cake Hack #1
For an easy way to jazz up an otherwise plain cake, create a sprinkle border! Place your cake on a tray to catch any falling sprinkles so you don’t have a huge mess to clean up afterwards.
Pour sprinkles around the cake onto the cake board and then use a spoon or an offset spatula or your hands to push them into the frosting at the bottom of the sides of the cake to make a border.
If you’ve just frosted the cake, the frosting will be soft and sticky so the sprinkles will attach easily. If the frosting has set, you’ll have to push them in a bit harder to make them stick.
With no other decorations, the sprinkled border makes this cake look glamorous!
Sprinkle Cake Hack #2
Creating shaped details with sprinkles can be a huge time saver, replacing tedious piping. I’ll show you a few examples. For piped flowers, you could use a small round piping tip to pipe dots of frosting in the middle of each flower using another colour, but that would mean tinting another colour of frosting and dirtying another piping bag and another piping tip.
Instead, pushing a sprinkle into the center of each flower takes less than a second!
These piped flowers are part on my online course on 50 Easy Cake Decorating Techniques for ANY Skill Level. Take the course or join the ClubPLUS for access to ALL of my classes and courses for just $17 a month!
On this cake, to add a heart between the two dinosaurs you could outline the heart with a cookie cutter and then pipe tiny dots to fill the heart shape, OR you can press a heart shaped sprinkle into the frosting instead!
Sprinkle Cake Hack #3
Sprinkles are a convenient way to cover up or distract from imperfections in a cake.
This zig zag design is nice and colourful and although the stripes aren’t perfect, once I’ve added sprinkles to make a gold design within the zig zags your eye is drawn to the texture of the sprinkles and you suddenly don’t notice the imperfections in the zig zags anymore!
Sprinkle Cake Hack #4
Stencils are stunning but tricky and it’s infuriating to peel a stencil off a cake to reveal a smudged outline or a missing part of the design. Instead of scraping the cake and starting all over again, use sprinkles to fix the stencil design! If the outline is smudged, spread the frosting a little bit beyond the original outline of the shape so that the smudge is included in the shape.
Then press sprinkles into the edge of the shape, again using a tray underneath the cake board to catch any falling sprinkles.
The quickest way to attach the sprinkles is to scoop up a handful and angle your hand so that they fall off against the edge of the shape. Since the base frosting on the cake has set, the sprinkles won’t stick to that but they will stick to the sticky frosting within the stencil shape.
The glitzy sprinkle outline will disguise the smudges AND make the design even more detailed.
If parts of the stencil design are missing because they peeled off with your stencil instead of sticking to the cake, add sprinkles to those sections to fill in the gaps AND add some interesting texture!
Sprinkle Cake Hack #5
Sprinkles add colour and texture to a cake and but also work excellently on cake toppers that bring the whole cake together by matching a base border. For example, add sprinkles to meringue pops before you bake them and use the same sprinkle mix to create a border around the bottom of the cake using the first sprinkle cake hack from this tutorial.
For a super easy no-bake topper, roll sandwich cookies like Oreos in sprinkles. Use the same sprinkle mix for a border to tie everything together.
Sprinkles make beautiful chocolate shapes to use as cake toppers, too! I teach how to make all of these cake toppers and more in my online course on 50 Easy Cake Decorating Techniques.
What’s your favourite way to use sprinkles to decorate a cake? Tell me in the comments!
Here’s the video version of this tutorial: