Level Up Your Cake Decorating Skills With TikTok's Lace Hack
Decorating a cake can be intimidating; piping skills take a lot of practice and dexterity to develop. But your next cake doesn't need a complete set of piping tips to be beautiful! A TikTok creator known for some pretty wacky cooking content shared a different technique you can try. She took a cake, laid some lace over the top, and used edible spray paint to print a design on the frosting.
Any patterned material with holes can work here, like a piece of lace, an old crocheted doily you never knew what to do with, or even fishnet stockings. It's an easy way to decorate a cake, whether it's one you just baked or a sheet cake you picked up from the store, as it appears the user did for this video. It turns the material into a stencil, giving you a negative image of the lace when you add a contrasting color. There are multiple ways to accomplish the effect and some essential tips to follow to do it right (so you don't get roasted on your own TikTok).
How to use lace as a stencil
First: You don't have to cut up your clothes to master this — you can use any kind of lace you have on hand — but don't grab anything too delicate; ultra-thin lace strands and extra-fine detail may get lost in the design. Second, it must be clean! It will be touching your cake. If you pick up some lace from your local craft store (maybe some spooky lace for Halloween or a beautiful flowery lace for a summer tea party), make sure to wash and dry it before using it as a stencil.
The TikTok from @MyJaneBrain shows her using edible spray paint, often sold as color mist or edible color spray. She used a lot of colors, layering them before they dried, which caused the colors to blend. You can still achieve a galaxy, tie dye, or ombre effect by layering colors, but let each mist color set a bit before adding additional colors so it doesn't look muddied. You don't need color mist, though — you can achieve the effect with edible glitter, nonpareil sprinkles, colored sugar, or by sifting cocoa powder or powdered sugar over the lace.
@myjanebrain My grandma taught me this cake trick 😍
Other ways to achieve this effect
The idea behind this TikTok assumes that you already have some kind of lace to decorate with. But as one commenter points out, specific tools are made to do this, too: Cake stencils!
A cake stencil is a flexible sheet, often made of plastic, with a design punched out. You can lay this sheet on top of or wrap it around your cake and use any of the contrasts mentioned to create the effect, like color mist or powdered sugar. Cake stencils also allow you to smooth frosting or royal icing over the cake for a different texture, peeling it off to reveal the stamped design — this is hard to do with lace because the fabric moves, disrupting the design. If you don't have any lace at home and don't want to sacrifice your doilies to the cake, you can get cake stencils online or from craft stores in designs like animal print, art deco patterns, chevron, and — of course — lace.