Quick and easy chocolate decorations

I love anything that is very easy to do but looks amazing, like adding killer heels to an outfit or executing a perfect two & a half somersault pike from a relatively low diving board. 

Look at the red flowers on these cakes. Pretty, eh? All you need to make them is:

• chocolate
• a piping bag
• caster sugar
• edible dust

Shake the edible dust and the caster sugar together and spread it on a plate. Be careful to use an edible dust - these are clearly marked with a gold sticker and must not be confused with the white sticker ones, which are non-edible

<<<< NO!                                                 OOH YUM! >>>

You really only need to buy red, yellow and blue because as you'll remember from primary school, you can mix these to make all the other colours. And if you want pink or a lighter shade, simply make the coloured mix paler by adding more sugar.

Melt your chocolate, put it into the piping bag and thickly pipe whatever shape you want onto the  coloured sugar. Leave this to set - you can put in the fridge. Then simply lift it off the sugar and stick it onto your cake.

The decoration can sit flat on a cake like this Pink Floyd cake I made for my friend Mark at the weekend (I'm not sure why I thought urban graffiti screamed Pink Floyd but he didn't complain). The shape will also be robust enough to stand up unaided, so you can put it  on top of a cake. 

You can use white, milk or dark chocolate but white chocolate shows up the colours best. If you want to pipe a brief insulting message with the chocolate, remember that you will need to do the letters in reverse. Have fun!