This Is the Prettiest (and Easiest) Way to Dress Up a Cake

With all sorts of spring and summer entertaining on the horizon — graduation parties, Memorial Day cookouts, bridal showers — you’re going to need a fast and fancy dessert to pull out of your back pocket. One gorgeous (and very on-trend) idea is to decorate a basic sheet cake with millennial pink swirls of frosting and gold flakes. Here’s how.

To make things easy on yourself, you don’t even have to make the cake from scratch — but if you want to, our one-bowl vanilla sheet cake is as easy as it gets. If boxed mix is more your speed, go for it (the author uses boxed mix and canned frosting). The part that really counts here is the presentation!

You’ll need four to six cups of your favorite basic vanilla frosting, which you’ll divide into two bowls. The first half of frosting will remain white (this is what you’ll evenly dot over the entire cake). The other half can be divided into a few bowls and turned various shades of pink with food coloring and/or powdered freeze-dried strawberries.

Once the white frosting is spread on the cake, you add some random spoonfuls of pink frosting and use an offset spatula to “smooth out the frosting, adding extra various different shades of pink icing in a swooshing wave-like motion.” Gild the lily with some edible gold flakes and you’re all set.

Whatever the occasion, this cake is sure to impress — no one even has to know how simple it was to bake and decorate!

→ Get the Recipe: How to Frost a Unicorn Cake from I Am a Food Blog