18 best cake-decorating classes in NYC for amateur bakers

The NY Cake Academy is New York City’s premiere bakery and cake decorating school. Founded by Joan Mansour, gold medal award winner by the Societe Culinaire Philanthropique and world-renowned cake decorator, the school has taught some of the most well-established cake decorators in the world, with work featured in Family Circle, Women's Day, and Martha Stewart Living. Decorators of all skill levels can take one-session workshop courses to practice or improve their technique or multi-week certification courses to become professional cake decorating experts. There are also numerous programs for children looking to learn how to blend art and baking, alongside a wide selection of themed courses to help prepare decorators looking to make cakes for a host of special occasions.

Learn the basics of cake decorating in this introductory course that will have you piping, sculpting and ruffling your buttercream into stunning works of edible art. You’ll spend time learning important techniques and designs (like piping shells, stars, zig-zag and rosettes), then you’ll put your new skills into action in a live cake decorating exercise. By the end of the course, you’ll have decorated your first cake (hopefully, first of many) and you’ll be ready to try your hand at more elaborate piping and designing challenges.

For new bakers and decorators, cakes can be intimidating. Thankfully, the cupcake exists, so you can try your hand at making delicious (and beautiful) baked desserts without worrying that one wrong move will undo all of your hard work. At Butter Lane, you can learn how to make cupcakes that stand on their own and will be the talk of the town, plus, you’ll get hands-on experience decorating each cupcake individually, letting you try out new techniques and practice your piping skills.

Cake decorating is an art that goes back to the earliest days of commercial bakeries and, while the practice has evolved a great deal, there is still something to be said for the classic designs of vintage cakes. In this class, you’ll learn the basic techniques you need to make cakes that look like they came straight out of vintage advertisements or dinner parties. This class is a great opportunity to take the basic skills you’ve mastered in other cake decorating courses and put them to good use in a focused, style training course.

The pipe and the spatula are the essential tools of any master cake decorator. They are how you shape and distribute your cream, and without a firm knowledge of how to use these tools, you won’t stand a chance of winning any cake design contests (or just reaching your own personal cake decorating goals). In this class, you’ll work on essential piping and spatula techniques to set your foundations and get your feet grounded in the world of cake decorating.

Cake decorating is so much more than just creating pretty designs out of buttercream and using piping bags to make flowers. In this course, you’ll work with fondant and crystalized sugar to create impressive geode-like structures within your cake, creating the illusion of reflective gemstones and minerals being cut out of the inside of the cake. This course is a wonderful introduction for students looking to use fondant to create works of art that go beyond traditional cake decorating techniques and who want to use food as a medium for building up 3d works of art. You’ll leave the class with your own work of fondant art and you’ll be prepared to start creating other impressive fondant sculptures in future classes.

NY Cake Academy offers a host of courses for kids to come in and learn the art of cake and cookie decorating. These classes are all themed around a time of the year (like fall or spring), a Holiday (like Christmas or Valentine’s Day), or just a general theme to help guide them (like dinosaurs or space). These classes are an easy and accessible way for young children to spend an afternoon getting to experience hands-on cookie and cake decorating activities, and they will get to leave with freshly decorated desserts to share and celebrate the occasion. You kids will love the chance to make beautiful works of edible art with their own hands and the chance to show-off their creations to the world.

In this five-part professional skills certification course, you’ll get a discount as you attend all of the courses in NY Cake Academy’s Buttercream track. You’ll go over piping techniques, horizontal designs, knives and spatulas to shape the cream and the best practices for creating beautiful flowers on a cake. This course provides all the training you need to start working on buttercream cakes at a near-professional level, so you’ll be ready to start putting your skills into practice on real cake-decorating projects.

One of the first things a new cake decorator needs to familiarize themselves with is the art of piping principles. Piping involves using a piping bag to create objects and designs on your cake out of buttercream or another flavored topping. This is how cake decorators prepare impressive designs that line the edges of a cake and how they create things like flowers or other simple designs that dot the top of the cake. In this course, you’ll also learn how to make buttercream and what the significant differences are between various kinds of buttercream (and how to decide what kind to use). If you want to get yourself started on the road to cake decorating mastery, this is the course for you.

While you may not think of it very often, the sides of a cake are as important to the overall presentation as the top. In this class, you’ll learn how to create designs and accents for the side of a cake, giving you additional opportunities to express your creativity in buttercream. This course focuses on making Swiss Meringue buttercream, creating layered cakes to produce visual effects, more advanced piping techniques and how to use turntables and spatulas to make the process easier. Learning how to craft the side of a cake is an essential part of the decorating process and this course will help guide you through the steps of making the perfect horizontal texture.

Drop flowers are a cake-decorating technique that involves creating stacks of buttercream flowers on the side of a cake, creating beautiful edible arrangements that can be personalized to your taste or needs. In this class, you’ll learn how these drop flowers are made and how you can create complex designs that won’t fall apart before you are ready to cut in. You’ll learn how to make buttercream for drop flowers and how to work with various Russian tip piping bags, which are specifically designed for this purpose. You’ll also learn how to blend buttercream together to create more complex visual effects in your cakes.

A recent development in the world of cake decorating, palette knife art involves using a specialized palette knife to smooth, blend and shape buttercream into impressive artistic designs. In this class, you’ll learn how to utilize this technique as a component of your cake decorating projects, and you’ll learn how palette knife art can complement more traditional cakes. You’ll learn how to make and blend colored buttercream, how to prepare the cake for the palette knife process and how to use piping bags and spatulas to complement your palette knife art.

One of the most impressive feats an early-stage cake decorator can master is creating life-like flowers as a part of their buttercream designs. In this class, which caps the buttercream essentials track, you’ll get hands-on experience making buttercream and learning how to use piping bags, couplers and tips and how to create 3d flowers and basket weave effects. You’ll also get more experience using a turn-table and making your own buttercream from scratch. With all of these skills in hand, you’ll be ready to start creating amazing buttercream designs and impressing all of your guests with these stunning cakes.

The internet has brought fondant cake decorating to the center of the public eye, and people love it. Unlike buttercream, which aims to blend functionality and artistic expression to produce cakes that are beautiful and delicious, fondant leans heavily towards the artistic side, using cake as a medium to create impressive pieces of art (often with the goal of disguising that they are, in fact, cake). In this program, you’ll learn how to use fondant and other tools to create cakes that look like inedible materials like leather and glass (including exercises where you make a purse and a shoe), and you’ll learn how to create marbling effects. This program is ideal for anyone who is serious about creating stunning works of cake art and who wants to try their hands at fooling their friends (or TV audiences) about what truly is a cake.

The flower is one of the most instantly recognizable and classic cake decorating techniques and it is also one of the most versatile. In this class, you’ll learn the art of piping beautiful flower designs with buttercream onto cupcakes. This will help you learn how to use a petal tip, how to use a piping nail to create realistic petal effects and how to create uniform flowers across a half-dozen cupcakes. This class is ideal for beginners looking to learn essential piping techniques and for experienced decorators looking to expand the scope of their skills. Once you learn how to make a perfect buttercream flower, you’ll be able to easily enhance the appearance of any dessert you bring to an event.

If you are putting together a team-building activity at work, a fun event for a shower or bridal party or just an activity for a group of friends and family on a nice weekend, you should consider enrolling in a group cake decorating event. These events range from practical demonstration courses where you’ll learn professional cake decorating skills to laid back party style classes where you’ll spend an afternoon just messing around with cakes that you can show off at the end of the event.

If you are looking to spend time with your team learning a skill and becoming more adept at creative thinking and tactile artistic design, consider enrolling in this beginner group cake decorating event. In this course, a professional instructor will guide you through basic piping, spatula and coloring techniques that are used to create exquisite buttercream icing cakes. At the end of this course, everyone will have their own cake to take home with them or to share with their fellow participants as they marvel at each other’s creations.

If you are looking for a laid back, enjoyable holiday party for your team, consider this group gingerbread house party. In this course, you and your team will be given all of the time and supplies you need to make your own personalized gingerbread house creations. A host will introduce you to the process of crafting the exterior of the house and then let you be free to create as you enjoy one another’s company and a festive holiday atmosphere. Once the event runs to a close, you’ll be able to share your creation with the group and, if you would like, hold a quick contest judging on everything from creativity to skill to most comical looking house.