Lettering

pwurple

Hiya cake fans. I am attempting a book shaped cake for a nephew shortly Chocolate sponge and buttercream, and a brown sugarpaste cover, white pages. He has a few short stories written, so I was going to do the title of one of them on the book.

Smoothing is ok, but lettering I am worried about. I want it to look like typeface, rather than piped. So I am thinking cut outs of sugarpaste with a sharp knife. Will I make templates from paper maybe and go around the paper shapes? Seems fiddly.

Any tips?

Princess Peach

You can get really thin edible pens, or a little jar of food colouring paint (not sure what its called) and a small paintbrush. That's what I use for detailing anyway, but never did lettering.

I would be tempted to try a thin pen and then use grease-proof paper for tracing from a template to make it neater. I assume you are using sugarpaste or icing for the pages, would be smooth to write on so.

Rosy Posy

If I were you I'd cut a stencil from wax paper or even cardboard, place it on the cake then spread butter cream on top, let it harden a little then very carefully take it off. You can tidy up the edges with a knife or skewer.

Oh, just saw above you were planning to use sugar paste- could you get some letter shaped cookie cutters and cut out the letters?

pwurple

Those are great ideas. Painting them on with a brush, or using cutters. Must see if I can get cutters small enough, and with a lower case. The ones I have are san-serif sort of comic book font, and look a bit childish for this. (and are too large)

The painting would be good too, but transferring or tracing on I'm going to struggle with I think. If I just print it out, draw some guide lines and do it by eye I might be ok. Gold/yellow pen on the chocolate sugarpaste would look great I think.

Thanks!

emzolita

I have times new roman tappits in lower font. theyre the cutters like a ruler with all the letters on one piece of plastic. Difficult to use at first, look at a youtube tutorial.
But the look like typed writing. theyre about 1.5cm tall though. xx
(I got them in Decobake btw)

pwurple

Aha, didn't even know those existed. Thanks! I'll give decobake a call about price and delivery, they don't have an online shop it looks like.

rubadub

If you printed it onto baking paper all the positioning will be perfectly correct as you can do it all in word. You might be able to poke rows of holes in the letters outline with a pin, then lay this on the cake and paint over it. So it is sort of like silk screen printing, the colouring goes in through the holes. This is probably easier to do than cutting proper stencils, it also means the centre of letters are intact, like the middle triangle of an "A". And the stencils cannot shift about as easy.

Now you have the basic outline you can take the paper off and paint them properly. If the edges look dodgy you could always roll thin snakes of icing and shape them around the outlines.