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Suggestions for Cake Decorating Typeface


GaryK

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I think he means piping in a style different from the cursive handwriting that is currently very common.

I have a collection of older professional pastry books, and they show using a variety of styles for piping lettering. An old English style, with each letter piped separately -no cursive, was common until recently, you can even see Nicolas Lodge use it in his book 'Pastillage and Sugar Moulding' -part of the Art of Sugarcraft series from 1987.

Books form the 1920's-30's show several Art Deco influenced styles. Before that, Gothic and Renaissance style piping was popular.

I'd say, find a font or typestyle you like, and just start trying to emulate it.

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Really impressive, especially the Cecil and Lily cake. Looks like hand lettering done with a wide-nibbed pen. How do you pull that off?

I usually always write in chocolate (either dark or white), piped through a paper cone.

Mostly, all I can say is practice practice practice, when it comes to writing. I was able to find

a good way of writing by making capital letters look "cursive-y". If you study it, you will know

that all my characters are are upper case letters with embellishments. :smile:

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How do you plan to apply typography to a cake?

I'd guess that one could make the design on paper (printout even) and 'prick through' to transfer the design as guidelines ... (isn't that how frescos were painted? OK, not the printout bit!)

I have great respect for people that can do this stuff. My skills must lie in other areas!

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch ... you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan

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How do you plan to apply typography to a cake?

Practice ?

http://www.caketoppers.co.uk/index.asp?Pag...tions--62705630

:wink:

And practice some more ...

http://www.deco.uk.com/content/view/99/135/

:biggrin:

Edited by dougal (log)

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch ... you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan

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May I ask how you did these? Really fun and beautiful work.

Nice cookie writing onetough!

Thanks for adding your pic!

In response to your question, it's a lot like royal icing colorflow, but I use white chocolate.

1. Print your font out (in reverse!)

2. Pipe a melted chocolate outline of each letter right on the paper. (if it's a really bold font....if it isn't, just pipe each letter) Put your paper on a piece of cardboard or a sheet pan to let it lay flat.

3. Go back and fill in your outlines if necessary.

4. Using white chocolate with no color, you can connect the words or letters together, as you've seen in some of my cakes, or you can just leave each letter separate, like I did on the PTTV cake and position each letter on the cake as you like.

5. Let the chocolate letters set in the fridge for about 5 minutes, then flip the paper over, and let them set about ten minutes more. Peel the paper off, and voila.....you have your specialty font.

You can do the same for pictures, as you can see, I did the same thing with the man with the martini glass on the martini cake.

It's not necessary to reverse the image when you are doing pictures (most of the time), but with letters and writing you HAVE to reverse the letters or your font will come out backwards when you are done. A lot of printers have settings wherein you can reverse images. On my printer, it's the "T shirt transfer setting".

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May I ask how you did these? Really fun and beautiful work.

Nice cookie writing onetough!

Thanks for adding your pic!

In response to your question, it's a lot like royal icing colorflow, but I use white chocolate.

1. Print your font out (in reverse!)

2. Pipe a melted chocolate outline of each letter right on the paper. (if it's a really bold font....if it isn't, just pipe each letter) Put your paper on a piece of cardboard or a sheet pan to let it lay flat.

3. Go back and fill in your outlines if necessary.

4. Using white chocolate with no color, you can connect the words or letters together, as you've seen in some of my cakes, or you can just leave each letter separate, like I did on the PTTV cake and position each letter on the cake as you like.

5. Let the chocolate letters set in the fridge for about 5 minutes, then flip the paper over, and let them set about ten minutes more. Peel the paper off, and voila.....you have your specialty font.

You can do the same for pictures, as you can see, I did the same thing with the man with the martini glass on the martini cake.

It's not necessary to reverse the image when you are doing pictures (most of the time), but with letters and writing you HAVE to reverse the letters or your font will come out backwards when you are done. A lot of printers have settings wherein you can reverse images. On my printer, it's the "T shirt transfer setting".

I totally get the reverse chocolate thing....it's so beautiful, too. Since I can't really do that on cookies, I make royal icing plaques to adhere to the cookies.

Those cakes were great...really, really fun. Love that Martini cake's retro images.

www.onetoughcookienyc.com

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you decorators are really amazing!

I remember back in the pre-mac college days (for the record they came out right as I was in the graphic program at college), we would laboriously have to re-create fonts by blowing up the one we wanted (now done by computer) and drawing a grid over the font to break it down, then draw a larger grid to scale, and finally redraw the font inside the larger grid. WTF! If I was born a year later that would have been a silly waist of time. However, it did give me a keen eye for recreating fonts because you view fonts by their components instead of just writing away and hoping for the best. Not sure if this trip down memory lane is useful here, but I couldn't just leave my Annie and OneTough, 'you're so great' comment by itself.

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you decorators are really amazing! 

I remember back in the pre-mac college days (for the record they came out right as I was in the graphic program at college), we would laboriously have to re-create fonts by blowing up the one we wanted (now done by computer) and drawing a grid over the font to break it down, then draw a larger grid to scale, and finally redraw the font inside the larger grid.  WTF!  If I was born a year later that would have been a silly waist of time.  However, it did give me a keen eye for recreating fonts because you view fonts by their components instead of just writing away and hoping for the best.  Not sure if this trip down memory lane is useful here, but I couldn't just leave my Annie and OneTough, 'you're so great' comment by itself.

Drawing anything, I have come to find out (never felt artistic enough to take an art course in school, but that's a whole other story), is nothing more than a series of lines and their relationship to one another..or some such thing. Ergo, the grid system is a perfect example of how to recreate something specific. And, because I work on cookies, it's one of the ways I use to figure out how to draw something specific on the cookie. Labor intensive & time consuming, yes, but once I get the repetitive motion/muscle memory thing down, I'm golden. Or so I like to think.

www.onetoughcookienyc.com

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