How to add captions to a cake or cookie decorating video on iPhone

Why caption cake and cookie decorating videos

Decorating videos, such as piping buttercream roses, flooding sugar cookies with icing, stacking and smoothing a layer cake or finishing Thanksgiving pies and holiday cookie trays, are watched in a feed with the sound off and paused by viewers who want to copy a technique. Captions let them follow each tip, color and step, and they help viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing.

This guide is for decorating and piping process clips. For full recipes from start to finish, see the cooking guide; for drawing and painting with a voiceover, the art process guide. CaptionAddr burns the captions into the picture, so they show wherever you post.

Caption a cake decorating video on iPhone

1. Talk with the mixer off. Explain the next step, then run the stand mixer or hand mixer, or record a voiceover over the decorating afterward. A running mixer covers quiet words, and CaptionAddr doesn’t remove noise.
2. Choose the video. Tap Select Video in CaptionAddr and pick the clip with Apple’s Photos picker. Overhead, vertical, square and landscape videos all work, and the video keeps its shape.
3. Let the captions generate. Captions start as soon as the video opens; keep the app open; the English speech is transcribed on your iPhone, not on a server.
4. Fix tips, colors and amounts. Piping tip names, icing and frosting terms, color names and amounts are the words most likely to come out wrong, and they matter most to someone decorating along. Correct them in Edit Captions. You can edit, delete and reorder words, with undo and redo.
5. Keep the piping in view. Choose one of the 20 fonts and a size that reads on a phone, turn on the tinted background over white icing or a busy counter, and drag the captions to an edge of the frame where they don’t cover the piping bag, your hands or the finished design.
6. Export and post. Tap Export Video to save the captioned copy to Photos, then upload it to TikTok, Reels, Shorts or any other app. The watermark is off unless you turn it on.

Tips for decorating video captions

• Say amounts out loud. Captions come from your speech, not from a recipe card or text shown on screen, so say each amount, color mix and tip size while you use it.
• Name the tool as you pick it up. Say “the small round tip” or “the offset spatula” when you switch, so the captions match what viewers see.
• Explain before the satisfying part. Long stretches of quiet piping have nothing to caption. Say what you’re about to do, then let the piping play.
• Keep music low or out. Music under your voice can cause missed words; add it in the app you post to, after the captions are made.
• Keep your original. CaptionAddr exports a new copy and leaves the original clip in your library.

Limits

• Speech only. CaptionAddr captions spoken English. It doesn’t read recipe cards, labels or text shown on screen, and it doesn’t caption mixer noise, music or sound effects.
• Captions only. The app doesn’t add ingredient lists, titles, arrows or step labels, and you can only fix, delete or reorder the transcribed words.
• No audio changes. The app doesn’t remove mixer or kitchen noise or change the audio; deleting a word removes it from the captions only.
• English only. CaptionAddr transcribes English speech and doesn’t translate.
• Single-word captions. Words appear one at a time, timed automatically, always in uppercase; there are no speaker labels, full-sentence layouts or manual per-word timing.
• Length. Free covers videos up to 2 minutes; CaptionAddr Pro covers up to 30 minutes. CaptionAddr doesn’t trim, split, speed up or combine clips. The App Store shows the current Pro price in your currency.
• Burned-in captions only. There is no SRT, VTT or text export, and the app doesn’t post to social platforms.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• How to add captions to a cooking video on iPhone
• How to add captions to an art or drawing process video on iPhone
• Captions for Instagram Reels

All caption guides →