The Culinary Canvas

• Drizzled sauces and icings frequently appear on desserts -- picture a Bundt cake with trails of chocolate glaze crisscrossing the slopes -- but you should by no means stop there. Drizzled sauces and gravies add visual appeal to meats, vegetables and soups. The tinge of green in a high-quality olive oil, for example, decorates the surface of a thick pureed tomato soup with spirals of flavor.

The Artist's Toolbox

• You can drizzle a sauce with just a spoon and a steady hand, but a few inexpensive tools give you a greater degree of control. Plastic squeeze bottles allow you to start and stop the flow of sauce at will. You can also use a simple zip-top plastic bag. Spoon or pour the sauce into the bag, seal it, then snip a tiny piece off one corner and use it like a pastry bag. Professional pastry bags and decorating tips add more precision and a variety of possible designs. For a thicker stream of sauce, work from the pour spout of a liquid measuring cup or with a bulb-top baster.

Tips and Techniques

• A sauce should flow smoothly off a spoon before you attempt to drizzle it. Avoid lumps and puddles by starting with your tool of choice offset to one edge of your intended target. For example, if you want to use a squeeze bottle to drizzle chocolate sauce onto a cake, position the squeeze bottle at a starting point just beyond the edge of the cake. Release the flow of sauce as you sweep the squeeze bottle with a steady movement across the top of the cake. Practice first on an empty plate to get a feel for the tool and how the sauce flows.

The Kitchen As a Studio

• Once you master the basics of a drizzled sauce, start experimenting with different applications and tools. For example, make both a brown chocolate and a white vanilla sauce to serve with a piece of pound cake. Pool the sauces in the center of the plate without mixing them. Starting at the top of one sauce, drag a wooden skewer or toothpick from one puddle across to the other, continuing down in a random zigzag pattern until you reach the bottom. Then, set the piece of cake on the plate so the pattern shows around the edges. Or, try dripping sauce through a sieve to achieve a speckled pattern on the plate.