So, you bought a striped cake comb to make striped frosting… What else can you use that comb for? In this tutorial I'll show you five other ways.
You don't have to cover your entire cake in stripes! Try adding them just around the bottom of the cake as a border or accent. Use your striped cake comb as normal at first, imprinting grooves all over the cake.
After chilling the cake in the freezer for 15 minutes, pipe coloured buttercream into some of the grooves. Use the original colour to fill in the rest of the grooves.
After you scrape around the cake a few times, the colorful stripes will start to appear. On the rest of the cake, the piped frosting will blend into the stripe grooves. These stripes will disappear and create a plain, flat, smooth background colour instead.
As with any striped cake, the stripes will get neater and neater as you scrape. Try this hot metal cake comb hack and 9 other ways to improve your cakes in 2024.
Instead of filling in the striped grooves with another colour of buttercream, leave them empty! This creates a unique textured cake. Alternatively, fill them in with interesting piping. This is one of the first cakes I made for my cake school back in 2019 but I still love the technique:
For ruffles like this, use a petal piping tip like a #102. Hold it with the narrow end of the piping tip pointing outwards. This way, the outer edge of the piping will be thin and delicate. The wider side of the piping will make thicker piping, which will attach to the cake more easily.
Pause for a moment at the top of each ruffle and again at the bottom. That pause will let the buttercream fold gently over itself to make these smooth curves. This is a #102 piping tip which makes the ruffles the ideal width for most striped cake combs. Larger petal tips like a #104 or #125 make ruffles that stick out beyond the frosting, which doesn't look as neat. They'd also be more likely to droop when the cake sits out at room temperature for a while.
You could fill the striped grooves with sprinkles or piped flowers. There are lots of possibilities to get creative with this design!
Use your striped cake comb to make multicoloured stripes, where every stripe is a different colour. First, push the comb into a crumb coated cake to show you where each stripe will eventually be. Then pipe a different colour in between each line scored on the cake.
Use your striped cake comb and you'll create multicoloured stripes with a gap in between each one. Scrape with your striped cake comb until these stripes are smooth. Then put the cake into the freezer for 15 minutes to set these first stripes.
Next, pipe colours into the gaps. The first stripes will be cold and firm so you won't damage them.
Scrape, scrape, scrape with a straight edged cake comb until all of the stripes are smooth and flat. They'll look printed onto the cake, not piped with buttercream!
Make your stripes go vertically up a cake instead of around it! Cover a piece of acetate with buttercream and use your striped cake comb on that, instead of directly onto a cake. Freeze for 15 minutes to set this frosting.
Then add your next colour, spreading to fill in the grooves between the first colour of stripes. Scrape off the excess to leave a flat layer of buttercream on the acetate. Then pick the acetate up and wrap it around a cake.
Chill the cake, peel the acetate off and do touch-ups.
I teach how to do this in my Layer Up program along with several other ways to use acetate and parchment paper for cake decorating. The Layer Up program takes you through three Layers to learn cake decorating techniques and also skills like stacking tier cakes and transporting cakes and frosting square cakes, as well as skills to start or grow a cake business like taking custom cake orders and using social media for your cakes and scheduling cakes. Join the Layer Up program to take your cake decorating skills from beginner to professional in 3-6 months!
To create a diagonal division between plain and striped frosting, start by using your striped cake comb as normal. After imprinting grooves around the whole cake, score a diagonal line by pressing a straight edged cake comb or a ruler gently against the frosting. Chill the cake in the freezer for 15 minutes to set the stripe grooves.
Then fill in one side of the cake with the same colour and scrape off the excess with a striaght edged cake comb. This will make those parts of the stripes disappear. Chill again to set this half of the cake and then use another colour in the grooves on the other side of the cake.
Scrape until the frosting is smooth. Then add pretty piping to cover up the edges of the stripes along the diagonal.
I hope you've seen a technique you'd like to try! Ask me any questions in the comments and visit my cake school to learn hundreds of cake decorating techniques with online courses and memberships to take your cake decorating to the next level. Thanks for watching!
You can also watch a video of this tutorial on 5 ways to use a striped cake comb:
