Pink Heart Lambeth Cake: A Step-by-Step Guide

Covering a cake in piped buttercream is an exciting and rewarding process, especially when creating a beautiful design like the Lambeth-style cake. In this guide, we’ll walk you through decorating a stunning pink heart cake using various piping tips and shades of pink buttercream. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced cake artist, this step-by-step tutorial will help you create a professional-looking cake that's sure to impress.

Preparing the Piping Bags

To start, we prepare our piping bags that are already fitted with our piping tips. Place your buttercream onto cling wrap and roll it into a cone shape. This makes it much easier to fill your bags mess-free.

Covering the Cake

We have covered our heart-shaped cake with pale pink buttercream in Rose Pink from Colourmill and let it set up in the fridge overnight. Our cake is an 8-inch heart, approximately 5 inches tall.

Adding the Gold Topper

We are using an acrylic Twenty-One plaque for our gold topper, from a local supplier, Fuz3D Creations. We place this directly onto our cold cake and gently press it onto the surface.

Piping the Buttercream

Base Border: Using a darker shade of Rose Pink for the border at the base, we start with a 6B piping tip from Loyal. Begin piping at the top middle position of the heart and work your way around the cake in a shell design.
Frilled Drapes: Using a medium shade of pink and a petal tip, Loyal 126, we place the piping tip upside down on our cake. Ensure the wider edge of the tip touches the cake so that the frilled edge is nice and thin.
Fixing Mistakes: If you make a mistake, don't worry. With crusting buttercream, you can easily remove and repipe the design after it has crusted over.
Second Layer of Frills: Add another layer of frills onto the drapes using the same shade of Rose Pink and the same piping tip.
Bottom Edge Decoration: Pipe a scalloped design using a #21 Loyal piping tip.
Additional Layer of Frills: Add another layer to the draped frills using the #32 Loyal tip and pipe a shell design.
Top Edge Design: Using the #21 Loyal tip, pipe a row of little hearts around the top edge of the cake. Then, pipe another shell-style border on the very top edge using the darker buttercream and the Loyal #6B tip.
Final Piping Row: For the inside edge on top of the cake, use the #21 Loyal tip. Start piping from the center, working your way outwards, and finish at the base tip of the heart. Angle your piping bag slightly away from the larger shell border to avoid touching it.

Final Details

Rosettes and Leaves: Using the #21 tip and the darker buttercream, pipe little rosettes at the top peaks of the drapes and around the top of the cake. Add leaves to the rosettes using the lighter pink buttercream and a leaf #352 Loyal tip.
Center Decoration: Add centers to the decorative piping using tip #32 Loyal.

Pricing Considerations

On the surface, you have a pretty pink heart lambeth cake which is very much on trend and, with less detail, quite mass-produced in some bakeries. But if you are a custom cake artist, all your orders are custom-designed and nothing is mass-produced.

Before you even start decorating, you need to prepare your cake, which includes hand carving, layering with ganache, covering with ganache, and then buttercream. Prior to this, you need to bake the cake and make both the ganache and buttercream.

You then have to colour your buttercream into three shades of ombre pink, making sure you have enough but not too much to keep wastage to a minimum. You also need to prep all your piping bags and tips, which takes time and costs money, as well as source a gold acrylic topper, boards, and boxes.

Add to this all the time for prep and washing up, administration for the order, overheads, profit, social media and photography, and professional development, and eventually, you will arrive at your price. It’s always so much more than just cake!