Sculpted Buttercream Pumpkin Cake Tutorial

These gorgeous pumpkins are fully edible, made with just cake and buttercream, plus hand-painted decor. What a delicious centerpiece for autumn celebrations this fall! See how easy it is with a sculpted buttercream pumpkin cake tutorial from Reva Alexander-Hawk. You can get super creative and add bold pastel colors with metallics to your pumpkins, too! You don’t have to stick to neutral shades.

Edibles:

• Cakes
• Buttercream icing mix (Satin Ice)
• Edible paint: white
• Edible gel color: grey (Rainbow Dust), dogwood, mossy green, and chestnut (The Sugar Art)
• Petal dust: white and black (The Sugar Art)
• Lemon extract or vodka

Equipment:

• Cake board
• Flexi scrapers
• Acetate
• Sponge crafts brush
• Offset spatula
• Small carving knife
• Sculpting tool
• Wire clay tool
• Paintbrushes

Prepare the Buttercream and Cake

1. Mix the buttercream icing mix according to directions on the container or make your own butter-based icing. Fill and stack the cake layers and chill until firm.
2. With a small knife, carve away the top edge of the cake and the bottom edge of the cake, picturing a pumpkin shape as you go.

Cover and Sculpt the Buttercream Pumpkin Cake

1. Fill a piping bag fitted with a coupler with buttercream.
2. Pipe from bottom to top to create ridges, leaving some open spaces that will be filled in later.
3. Using your offset spatula, create a divot on top for the stem to later rest in.
4. Smooth out ridges without flattening them out too much and place into the refrigerator to chill until firm.
5. Once chilled and firm, using buttercream, fill in the spaces with an offset spatula.
6. Using a small piece of acetate, smooth out the areas of the soft buttercream, being careful to curve it slightly so that your ridges remain.
7. Place back into the refrigerator to firm. Using a flex scraper/smoother and acetate, smooth out the chilled buttercream until smooth. The acetate will allow you to get a supersmooth surface on a rounded area of buttercream.

Add the Concrete Base Color

1. Use 2 drops of grey gel color to 1 cup of buttercream and mix well. Then add 1 drop of green gel color to help balance out the color (adding in the green helps to take away the blue base in the grey, giving it a more natural look). Then mix in ½ teaspoon of black petal dust and mix well.
2. Apply the concrete-colored buttercream to your cake.
3. Smooth over the concrete buttercream as you did before. Chill the cake once again until firm.
4. Once chilled, you can go back over your cake with more buttercream and a foam paintbrush to fill in any bare spots and to add texture.

Create a Concrete Effect

1. Mix 2 teaspoons of white petal dust with lemon extract or vodka to create a loose paste.
2. Using a sponge craft brush, brush onto the chilled buttercream pumpkin cake.
3. Start from the top center and brush downward to create highlights. Blend until you reach a color palette you like and it looks like concrete.

Sculpt a Buttercream Stalk

1. We will be using Satin Ice buttercream icing mix, straight from the container as a sculpting medium. Scoop out a ball about the size of a plum.
2. Add in ⅛ of a teaspoon each of chestnut and mossy green petal dusts. Blend together, leaving some streaks.
3. From this ball, create pumpkin stems, using your modeling tools and a wire brush tool to create texture. Place in the refrigerator to firm up. I create extras just in case.
4. Using the same dust colors, create a glaze with lemon extract or vodka and brush over the stem.
5. Attach to the chilled pumpkin and blend with a brush. Using chestnut dust blended with a small amount of lemon extract or vodka to create a paste, paint onto the stem to give it more depth and texture.

Paint the Buttercream Pumpkin Cake

1. Create a paste of white petal dust and white paint to use as a paint to embellish your concrete pumpkin.
2. Paint onto your chilled buttercream cake with a fine-tip brush in your chosen folk pattern.

This tutorial originally appeared in the September/October 2020 issue of American Cake Decorating.

Reva Alexander-Hawk

Reva Alexander-Hawk is a regular on our TV screens and was the winner of Wedding Cake Championships, Cake Wars, Halloween Wars, and has been seen on shows such as Duff Till Dawn, Ridiculous Cakes, as well as being a regular contributor to Hallmark Channel’s Home & Family. As the “go-to” source for sweets within her family, Reva is a lifelong baker. She is a graduate of the distinguished California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, studied baking and pastry with industry leaders, and continues to value the importance of education both as a student and an instructor. In 2002, Reva officially launched her own cake and pastry business, Merci Beaucoup Cakes. Calling on her connections in the Los Angeles area, she developed a glowing reputation as a high-end cake decorator, supplying cakes across California and beyond. Her hard work and amazing creations landed her on three seasons of the show Amazing Wedding Cakes, which has aired globally in more than a dozen countries. It remains an experience that has opened up many wonderful opportunities to share her skills with the cake community from North America to Europe and become a trusted name in the sugar-art world.