Marbled buttercream on the outside of a cake can give it a fun and unique look to an elegant and fancy appearance. This technique looks fabulous for a youthful birthday cake, an elegant wedding cake, or many other occasions in between. The design possibilities are endless. The selection of colors and toppings can be anything that you can dream of.

How to Marble Buttercream for your Cake

First Steps

1. Start off with your favorite cake. Pictured is “My go to Vanilla Cake”
2. Make your favorite buttercream frosting. I am sure it is this Vanilla Buttercream recipe. 🙂
3. Frost your cake as you normally would. Reminder for those who might need it… first crumb coat the cake, refrigerate the cake until the buttercream sets and then frost all over the cake creating smooth sides and top.
4. Decide how many colors and what colors you would like in your marbling. I decided to go with a couple shades of blue with the white butter cream. Color your buttercream in small bowls.

Measuring the Cake

Measure the circumstance of the cake with a flexible measuring tape like a fabric sewing measuring tape or, you can do that fancy math… Pie equals mc squared. For a 7 inch cake pan that would be: 7 x 3.14. or 21.98…the same as 22 inches.

Additionally, you need to measure the height of the cake, how tall your cake is after the frosting on it. The cake measurement from the base of the cake up to the top was 4 inches for my cake.

Making the Needed Parchment Paper Template

Now that you have your measurements , parchment paper will need to be cut for your dimensions. For this cake, I cut the parchment paper 23 inches in length to get a small overlap and cut the width at 4 1/2 inches to make sure that the marble wrap would reach the top of the cake all the way around.

Preparing Your Work Surface

Remember, you are working with food coloring and potentially this could stain. Having a large piece of parchment paper under what I am working on serves as good protection for the work surface. I place a large piece of parchment paper onto my work surface and then place the piece of parchment paper for the cake on top of it.

How to Marble The Buttercream

Using an off set spatula, start off with placing your lightest color of frosting in random places on the parchment paper. Next apply your second color followed by your next color.

Continue adding frosting to the parchment paper.Add more of the light or darker colors where you believe it is needed. The goal is to completely cover the parchment paper from the very top to the bottom. The buttercream needs to be a moderately thick layer for frosting on the parchment paper.

Applying the Marbled Buttercream to the Cake