Diwali Rangoli Cake Decorating Tutorial

I made this Diwali Rangoli cake a couple of years ago and I just realized that I have never shared this cake anywhere. Since the Diwali festival is just 2 months away, I think this would be a good time to share the cake now.

A rectangle cake with Rangoli design in blue and orange

Bright and cheerful Diwali Rangoli Cake

The inspiration for this cake came from the colorful rangoli patterns that are very much part of the Indian culture.

Accordingly to Wikipedia, Rangoli is an art form native to Nepal, India and Bangladesh (known as Alpana) in which patterns are created on the floor in living rooms or courtyards using materials such as colored rice, dry flour, colored sand or flower petals (extracted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangoli)).

My Rangoli pattern on this cake, however, was created using fondant. And I used the 'painting technique' to create this bright-colored edible Rangoli on my Diwali cake.

Diwali Rangoli Cake in buttercream

How to Make a Diwali Rangoli Cake

These were the main supplies I used for this cake:

Cake - I baked a rectangle cake measuring 10 inches by 12 inches. I used my butter pound cake recipe for the cake.
Butter icing - I covered the cake in butter icing. Butter icing is a much stiffer form of buttercream. And I have a different recipe for butter icing on my blog. The major difference lies in the amount of sugar that goes into the icing. Butter icing contains a high proportion of sugar to butter as compared to buttercream.
Fondant - I used my homemade fondant for the rangoli on the cake as well as for the wordings.
Gel food colors - I used Wilton food colors
Food paint brushes - I used the brushes to paint the rangoli. All of my brushes are Wilton.
Wilton piping round tip 3 and star tip 16 - I used the round tip to pipe buttercream dots on the cake. The star tip was used to pipe the rope border around the cake.
Alphabet mold - I used Wilton alphabet mold for the wordings on the cake.

And this was how I decorated the Diwali Rangoli cake:

Once the cake was baked and cooled, I leveled it. This was a single layer cake and the cake did not have any fillings.
I then covered the whole cake with butter icing and smoothed the icing all around the cake. The icing had an ivory hue to it because of the butter and I left it like that.
Once the cake had been covered with icing, I prepared the rangoli design.

The Rangoli design

I sketched the design on my own. Once I was happy with it, I traced it onto a parchment paper. And then I cut it out following its outer outline.
Next, I rolled my white fondant to about ⅛ inch thickness. I placed the rangoli template on it and cut out the design following its outline. The rangoli design outline is a circle and that was the shape I cut out of my fondant.
Once cut, still keeping the template on the cutout, I used my knife tool and marked the lines of the rangoli design. In marking the lines, I used the knife to cut along the lines on the template. However, I made sure to only apply enough pressure to leave a cut mark on the fondant and not cut it through. And by the time I completed the tracing, the rangoli parchment template was totally in pieces. This is totally fine as I was not going to use the template anymore.
I removed the paper template and painted the fondant. In painting the rangoli, I diluted the gel food colors lightly with water and painted them on. For added effect, each section of the rangoli had the paint gradually applied from a darker shade to a lighter shade of the same color.
Once the painting was completed, I gently lifted the rangoli piece with a large spatula and placed it on the cake. I then piped orange buttercream dots all around the outline of the design. I also piped green and yellow buttercream dots to other sections of the rangoli as shown:

Diwali Rangoli Cake with colorful painted design

Wordings on the cake

After the rangoli was completed, I did the wordings on the cake. For this, I used Wilton alphabet mold and fondant in brown and yellow colors. To make the double-colored letters, first, having dusted the mold with cornstarch, I rolled yellow fondant into a thin sausage and pressed it in the mold. I used a thin-bladed spatula to level and press it down. After that, I placed brown fondant in the mold, on the yellow earlier. I leveled and removed excess from the molds so that when the letters are removed from the mold, the backs are level when placed on the cake.
I put the mold into the fridge for a few minutes and then removed the alphabets from the mold. The double colored alphabets were quite time-consuming to make but the results were gorgeous.
Once I had all the alphabets, I arranged them on my Diwali Rangoli cake. Since I was putting them on butter icing, the alphabets did not require any further ''glue" to hold them in place on the cake.