Sugar Geek Show logo

menu icon
subscribe
search icon

Updated on December 7, 2021 by · This post may contain affiliate links ·

Painted Portrait Cake Tutorial

Skill level: Intermediate

Learn to create a beautiful birthday cake with a hand-painted portrait using Karen Portaleo's new Edible Artist oil paints. You will learn how to make this elaborate cake, with hand-painted golden details scrollwork flourishes and along with the gravity-defying flower hoop. This flower hoop is an awesome show-stopping piece that's sure to please party goers.

There's a lot to cover in this tutorial, so let's get our tools together and let's get started!

52:39 Minutes of Instruction

What You Will Learn

  • How to paint a portrait onto a cake using edible oil paints
  • Learn how to add scrollwork details to a cake
  • How to create a gravity-defying floral hoop and how to arrange flowers on it

Tutorial Chapters

  1. Overview of the structure 0:29
  2. Attaching board "feet" 4:39
  3. Attaching the hoop 9:34
  4. Stacking the cakes 17:12
  5. Adding the center circle 19:52
  6. The portrait outline 24:21
  7. Painting the portrait 28:58
  8. Making gold details 40:39
  9. Preparing the flowers 47:20
  10. Decorating the hoop 48:59

This is the preview

Watch the full tutorial

The complete step-by-step video, plus the templates and materials list, is inside Sugar Geek University along with 170+ other cake tutorials. Every learning path opens with lessons that are free to watch, no account needed.

Start with 7 free lessons

Or see everything inside, from $14.99 a month. Cancel anytime.

More Course Preview

About Liz Marek

Liz Marek is a professional cake artist and recipe developer who has been teaching baking and cake decorating since 2008. She founded Artisan Cake Company in Portland, Oregon in 2009 and now runs Sugar Geek Show, where she publishes kitchen-tested recipes, food science explanations, and step-by-step tutorials.

Liz is best known for sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes. She won Netflix's Is It Cake? Holiday 2 in 2025 with a hyperrealistic Santa cake, and has competed on and won Food Network cake competitions. Cake Masters Magazine named her one of the top 10 cake artists in 2017. She is the author of Artisan Cake Company's Visual Guide to Cake Decorating and a graduate of the Oregon Culinary Institute.

Her focus is on explaining not just how a recipe works but why it works, so bakers can troubleshoot instead of guess. Every recipe on this site is tested before it's published.

Liz teaches full-length cake tutorials, including sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes, at Sugar Geek University.