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Updated on December 2, 2021 by · This post may contain affiliate links ·

Anime Cocoa Butter Portrait Cake Tutorial

Skill level: Intermediate

I got the opportunity to create a beautiful birthday cake for a girl who is really into Anime, specifically Sword Art Online. I knew this would be the perfect time to try out cocoa butter for painting portraits, and the results were amazing!

Cocoa butter painting creates beautiful, oil painting-like finishes on cakes. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to prep your cocoa butter for painting, what brands work best, how to paint portraits and realistic clouds.

54:17 Minutes of Instruction

What You Will Learn

  • How to hand-paint character portraits in manga/anime style using cocoa butter
  • Learn how to create and attach wafer paper flowers
  • How to paint clouds and airbrush a seamless color gradient

Tutorial Chapters

  1. Covering the cakes in fondant 0:36
  2. Stacking the cakes 10:09
  3. Wafer paper flowers 13:43
  4. Making the portrait stencil 16:17
  5. Airbrushing the cake 18:58
  6. Painting the faces 22:49
  7. Painting the hair 40:03
  8. Painting the clothes 46:59
  9. Painting clouds 48:55
  10. Adding the flowers 53:07

This is the preview

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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.