This Store-Bought Cake Trick Will Make All Your Friends Think You're A Pro Baker

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

In a dessert landscape where "freshly made" reigns supreme, store-bought cakes are actually a no-brainer for all of your sweet treat needs. Sure, who hasn't oohed over chewy, gooey chocolate chip cookies right out of the oven? Who wouldn't aah over a blueberry pie cooling on the windowsill? But cake doesn't have to come with that kind of pressure or precedent. For one, you generally have to let a cake cool before you can even get to any razzle-dazzle decorating, that freshness timer ticking away all along. And we're just not sure that many people have ever marveled over a mouthful of warm, steamy sponge in any case. And you can still dress store-bought cakes right up to look both homemade and professionally polished for a little extra fun, or even some entry-level culinary deception.

The best way to make your store-bought cakes look not only like you prepared them from scratch, but also that you're a particularly talented baker, is to lean into luxe finishes. Your instinct might be to go rustic and scrawl on a few lopsided icing flowers, or some loopy topical message, but a little metallic shine, bejeweled sparkle, or fancy botanicals go a lot farther. And as long as you're making any extra effort to zhuzh up your store-bought cake, you might as well go all the way. A few upgraded upgrades from the confectionary aisle beat the more everyday alternatives by a mile.

The easiest way to dress up a store-bought cake at home is to buy a relatively less-adorned one to begin with. If you want to reimagine it with some understated sparkle or in gilded glory, it doesn't make a ton of sense to spend a bunch of time scraping piped rosettes off the thing before you get started. Speaking of flowers, however, edible dried varieties like orchids create a more refined tableau with minimal required skill other than deciding where to place them. Packing plenty across your cake's surface, for example, creates an abundant bouquet effect. More conservative, even spacing, or a studied cascade effect would also be elegant applications.

In desserts, as in life, little adds sparkle as much as sparkle itself. All manner of edible gold is sold for foiling, sprinkling, and glittering to 24-karat success, like BeePoint's Edible Gold Foil Flakes. The latter formulation, in particular, can be generously showered atop a store-bought cake for some delightful excess. Dot it with more gold, silver, or pearl sprinkles, too, which are shaped into shiny, sugary beads, for a cake landscape that starts to look like an upturned jewelry box. Food-safe glitter and edible diamonds are the icing, or rather, ice, on the cake.