Open Book Cake Decorating Tutorial

Books are a great inspiration when it comes to novelty cakes. 3D open book cakes can be designed in many forms. It can be a single closed book, a stack of closed books, or an open book.

Book cakes may sound difficult to make but in reality, they are fairly easy even though a bit of carving is required on the cake. Here is one such cake I have made. It’s an open book, and the decoration was done entirely in butter icing.

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How to Make an Open Book Cake

This is what I used to make the cake:

• One 6 inches by 10 inches rectangle cake – It was a single layer cake baked using my chocolate cake recipe. The book cake would not look nice if it’s too tall, so I made a single layer cake. The height was approximately 2 inches.
• Butter icing – This is stiffer than buttercream making it easier to hold shape and work with. Click here for my recipe. The entire cake was covered with butter icing. I did not tint it, so it was left with a natural ivory hue.
• Buttercream – I used buttercream to pipe the wordings on the cake as well as pipe the leaves and scrolls as part of the decoration on the cake. I also used buttercream to cover the sides of the cake.
• Royal icing – I used royal icing for the pink flowers. These were made in advance. I piped them onto pieces of parchment paper and left them to set and dry before peeling them off to be put on the cake. When using royal icing for flower piping, the consistency has to be stiff so that the petals can hold shape. I prefer to use royal icing compared to buttercream simply because I live in a hot and humid country and buttercream is difficult to handle at such temperatures.
• Wilton round tip 3 and star tip to make the open book cover (in dark pink), the birthday wordings, the sides of the book, i.e. the pages, as well as the leaves and scrolls.

And here is how I decorated the cake:

• Once the cake was baked and cooled, the first step is to carve the center of the open book. I placed the cake with the longer side lying horizontally. I measured the length of the cake and using a toothpick, marked a line that runs vertically right down the center. And then, I cut out a triangle wedge in the center making sure the depth of the wedge does not go more than half of the thickness of the cake itself. Then, slice off another tiny triangle piece at the bottom, exactly opposite the top wedge.
• Next, I sliced off the sides of the cake slanting outwards to denote the pages on an open book.
• Once that is done, I cleaned all the crumbs on and around the cake. I then covered the top with butter icing and smoothed it. Next, was the sides of the book. I used a star nozzle for this. I pressed the nozzle against the cake while piping so that the icing comes out from the nozzle serrated, and that produces the pattern of stacked pages’ lines.

Decorating the open book cake cover

• Next, I did the book cover. With some dark pink icing (using the round tip), I piped a long line all around the book for the cover. I also piped in the tiny triangle piece cut out earlier.
• At this stage, the book was literally ready for me to decorate the open pages.
• For the open pages, I wrote the birthday message first. After that, I did the flower deco. I piped the scrolls, place the flowers on the cake, and then piped some green buttercream leaves (the same one I used for the scrolls). For the finishing touches, I added silver dragees at the end of each scroll.

And that was how I decorated this open book cake.

I hope this tutorial was helpful.

Happy creating your open book cakes!