How to Design a Cake with Cake Templates

As a home baker, your creations are personal.  A beautiful cake with a cascade of flowers can brighten up the birthday girl’s day.  Or the simple lemon blueberry cake you made on a whim ends up being your dad’s favorite cake.  Baking and caking matters.  But it can be stressful.  So let me show you how to design a cake with my stress free method.

This page may contain affiliate links which means I may earn a commission as an Amazon Associate (or other affiliate program) from qualifying purchases. I only recommend products that I use and trust.

This post was originally published on December 10, 2020.  It was republished on August 14, 2025 with updates.

 

Do I Need a Plan?

 

I’m a micromanager and I come by it naturally.  So the idea of just winging a cake design has never been a big hit with me.  If you decide to bake and decorate your cake without a plan, you’re more likely to run into issues like running out of materials or not remembering where every detail goes.

Now, in full transparency, I don’t sketch and plan out every single cake I make.  But I’d say about 90% of my cakes start as sketches.  And you know what?  The cakes that I decide to free style are always more stressful.  So let’s work on some good habits today.

 

 

How to Design a Cake

 

Drafting up beautiful cake designs doesn’t have to be difficult at all.  First, start with your flavors.  Figure out the flavors of your cake, filling (if using), and frosting.  This will help you figure out the cake’s color scheme.  Want chocolate frosting?  Well, then you know you won’t be doing a neon colored cake.

Once that’s all sorted, look for inspiration.  Maybe browse Pinterest or Instagram, or if you have a home bakery, ask your customer for their vision.  Then figure out how to use these inspiration pictures to create your own unique cake design. You can totally reverse this process.  If there’s a cake design that you know you want to pull off, figure out which flavors will work with it the best.

 

Do I Need to Be an Artist?

 

Heck to the NO!  Like I said, I’m terrible at sketching.  You don’t need to be able to draw perfectly, you just need to be able to draw something that can reflect the different elements of your cake design.

Can’t draw flowers?  No prob.  Draw circles in their place.  Just go in and label your cake design so that you can remember exactly what is what. As long as you understand what the sketch is showing, it doesn’t matter how pretty it looks.

 

 

Who Should Sketch Their Cakes?

 

Anyone who is serious about caking and cake design.  Maybe it’s a hobby, maybe you sell your edible works of art.  If you want to improve your cake design process, sketching will be a huge help. I even have one free cake template available to subscribers in my Resource Library.

Cake bakers have the unique challenge of dreaming up a beautiful design before figuring out all of the tools and materials needed to make it a reality. The more intricate this design is, the harder it will be to remember each element and place it perfectly.  

 

Related Reading: 7 Reasons You Can’t Make a Perfect Cake

 

Turn Your Cake Sketch Into Reality

 

You’ve got your beautiful cake sketch, so now what?  When it’s time to actually put buttercream to cake, I pull out my cake sketch, give it a once over and get started.  You can watch my whole cake design process in this video.

This totally saved my butt on a recent order.  I almost forgot about the sprinkles on the bottom of this cake!  Yeah, I probably would have remembered before it was too late, but last minute decorations and alterations are stressful.  Having a visual reminder is just so easy.

 

 

What’s Your Process?

 

Everyone has their own approach to cake design.  What’s yours?  Leave me a comment and tell me if this has helped you tweak or develop your own methods on how to design a cake.  I love the collaborative attitude in the cake community.

And if you want, you can follow Bakes & Blunders on Facebook.  I’ll share new posts, tips & tricks, and get your input on different baking and caking items.  Thanks for joining me today.  Happy Caking!