Cake Decorating Stencil

Want to put a special design on a cake but don't know where to begin icing?

We had that problem, until we solved it with a homemade cake stencil. All we needed was a piece of 11" x 17" paper, an X-Acto knife, some high-lighters and some powdered sugar.

And a cake, of course.

Step 1 Keep your design simple.

I'm not going to go too much into design parameters. This is your cake. Knock yourself out. But I would recommend that for your design, go with something relatively simple, mostly geometrical. In our case, we had a cartoon-ified squirrel that had been broken down visually to his vector-based shapes. Vector-based designs have the added benefit of being scalable.

Whatever you decide, print the design on a piece of paper large enough to cover your cake. Our design fit perfectly on a piece of tabloid-sized paper (11" by 17"). Again, keep it simple. Plain white paper will do just fine. And for the sake of insurance, print three or four copies.

Comments

[ispiti]

hah, from thumbnail page it looked ike taties. now i see it is not

[Patrik]

Hmm - I guess you could just dust the entire design with different colors of sugar...

[TangMu]

agreed - the sugar looks good just on its own. not as tasty tho. you could try working a greyscale using demerera(?), cane sugar and possibly even cocoa powder. If you are planning on making a lot of these then it would be worthwhile cutting the design out onto thin metal such as a cokecan and cutting by repeated scoring with a stanley or xacto (or a fine hacksaw). I have seen some of these stencils used in coffee houses for sprinkling designs into the froth using coca powder.

[Patrik]

I was thinking of coloring some batches of sugar with food coloring - or just buying different colored sugar - and then covering the entire surface of the cake, using one stencil for each color. Kinda like silk screening. Except without the silk screen. And with cake. And, well, sugar. :D A greyscale version would be very subtle, but unless you can graduate the gray levels sufficiently, I'm not sure how good it would look. Hm... you could try making gradations by blending the borders between gray levels using a feather?

[TangMu]

from my own experiences stenciling there are ways to get around feathering and diffusing the borders. Notably working in blocks of colour not just line and having zig-zag edges to show gradients. Its a more bold, graphic kinda look but that is half the allure.

Also you can use the base colour of the cake for a black(brown) value. A lot of stencils are most effective when only using a limited palette - having more than 2 colours and a base is a lot of hassle to cut out x_x.
I recommend having a look at Stencil Revolution to see how far you can push stencils. Its not just a poor man's silk screen :p

[GorillazMiko]

that cake looks good :-)

[grabbingsand]

Thanks! (And it was.)