I have a friend that does NOT want me to pipe on the cake she requested me to make. It is going to be a red velvet cake with buttrecream creamcheese frosting covered in red fondant. She wants me to paint or hand write happy birthday to her son in Chinese. I know how to write in Chinese. I actually pipped happy birthday before on other friend's cakes. However, this one is adimant about NO piping.

So, my question is - what would be the easiest way to paint or handwrite on the cake? I read on some sites to simply use the food color gels or water down your color icing to a watery consistency, and then you can paint (or brush?). Any suggestions for how to paint?

Easiest way for me is to do a banner or cut-out in gumpaste, let it set up then use food color markers. If your gumpaste has not set up your marker will sink right in and make a mess. You could do the same thing with diluting straight gel color with vodka or water.

I use the cut out because if I make a mistake I can easily do another one, not so with drawing right on the cake.

Good luck,

Jennifer

Would yellow show up on red fondant, or is the gum paste banner the best route? My plan was to paint on the red fondant, but I think the red fondant by Duff (bought with a coupon haha) is a pretty bright red. So I don't know if the yellow color would really show up well on it if I were to paint on it. I want to minimize the white mainly because white is a color worn during mourning time in Asian cultures. She really wants this to be an Asian cake: mostly red and yellow. I suppose I can go ahead and cut out the shapes for the characters and find paint it soon. The cakes needs to be delivered Sunday

But black is OK for characters, you could do black with a yellow outline, or even better, get some gold luster dust, do thick black then paint a thinner yellow inside with the gold dust.

It's just me, but I do cutouts or banners, just in case I make a mistake it's no big deal - it's not like I just painted on the cake! But my writing (piping or drawing) is the worst of my skills so I take precautions. If you are good at that then skip the cut-out step and go straight on the cake.

You can use straight fondant, it just takes longer to dry then gumpaste. The firmer/dryer the surface the sharper the lines and your color goes on smoother.

Oh, just thought of something else, you could do a royal icing transfer, it's not technically piping, but would stand out nicely. Royal dyes black, red and yellow beautifully.