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Make laser-cut food decorating stencils

TUTORIAL

Use the hackspace workhorse to make professional-looking edible treats.

Make laser-cut food

decorating stencils

aser cutters have become a staple

of hackspaces across the UK, usually

employed to produce plywood boxes,

acrylic constructions, and engraved

signage. It’s easy to use them for

making in the kitchen, and it can result

in some unique and beautiful edibles. It can be really

fun to use tools with unintended materials, and you

can end up with some really funky makes, (or just

some piles of junk!)

THE HACKSPACE BAKE-OFF

Generally speaking, there are two ways of using

stencils in the kitchen. The first is to paint an edible

adhesive (glucose or golden syrup) through the

stencil, remove it, and then apply whatever you’d

like to on top. This works well on cakes and with

heavier sprinkles. The second is to hold the stencil

above the item, and sprinkle something through.

This tends to work best for decorating sticky

items (self-adhesive if you will), and if you want to

sprinkle powder.

It’s important to choose your materials carefully –

you don’t want to poison anyone if you can avoid it! If

you’re painting through, you need your material to be

waterproof, food safe, and (ideally) flexible. Mylar is

one such material (though at the time of writing is only

certified as food safe in the US, not the EU). Whilst it

can brown a little when cutting, once you’ve got the

settings spot, on you can limit this. It’s also easy to

clean after use. You can pick sheets up from a variety of

places on the internet – eBay is a good source.

For rigid stencils, you just need material that’s not

going to contaminate what you’re sprinkling through (it

won’t touch the food). Cardboard works fine for this.

To design the stencil, you’ll need a 2D CAD

(computer-aided-design) software package. Two of the

most popular available are, Inkscape and QCAD (both

free downloads), which is what we’ll be using in this

tutorial – though the principles are much the same for

any software.

If you want to make a stencil from an existing

image, you need to generate paths from the image,

and Inkscape is usually the best bet for that. Black and

YOU’LL NEED

A laser cutter

Computer with

2D CAD software

(inkscape and/or

QCAD are good,

free ones)

Food-safe sheet

material

Washing up

equipment

Edible adhesive

Cocoa powder,

hundreds-and-

thousands or other

sprinkling medium

Archie Roques

By day a humble A

level student, by night

a hardware engineer,

Norwich Hackspacer,

and general projects

man. Also blogs at

roques.xyz.

L

@archieroques

Right

It’s always important

to make sure your

coffees are entirely

on-brand!