How To Make A Christmas Lights Cake

During the holidays, I feel a lot more inspired to go over-the-top with cake and cookie decorations. I want to make desserts that are just as vibrant as all those decorations that you’ll find on a Christmas tree. In fact, those twinkling strings of tree lights were the inspiration for this Christmas Lights Cake! The design is very simple and makes a cake with a holiday of holiday spirit.

To make this kind of cake, you need a few supplies. You will need:

• Green Icing
• Peanut M&Ms or Jelly Beans
• A Piping Bag or Ziploc bag
• A frosted cake

I like to start with a white cake so that the colors of the lights really shine, and dye a small portion of the frosting green to make the “cord” for the lights. You won’t need too much green frosting – maybe half a cup at the most, depending on how large your cake is.

How to: Place the green frosting in your piping bag or Ziploc bag and cut a small hole in the corner. Pipe a large squiggle over the top of the cake (I like to add the sides later, but you can pipe a squiggle around the sides of the cake, as well). At regular intervals, pipe small dollops of frosting along the side of your squiggle to create the bases for the lights. On each base, place a peanut M&M or a jelly bean. Repeat until the whole string is finished.

I like to lay out all my peanut M&Ms or jelly beans in advance, so I can get an idea of what the colors will look like on the cake. I am partial to bright colors and try to get a whole rainbow of red, green, blue, orange and yellow onto my cake, but you can keep things simple with just one or two colors, if you prefer. I like to use large M&Ms on whole cakes, while jellybeans tend to work a bit better on cupcakes or smaller cakes.

You can use any size or flavor of cake with this type of decoration. I used a four-layer Chocolate Peppermint Layer Cake, which is a festive flavor that matches the fun decorations, but they will look just as good on a plain chocolate or vanilla cake. You can also use a single layer cake or a sheet cake as your base, just putting the decorations on the top and leaving the sides of the cake unadorned.