Tips on creating beautiful sugar embroidery patterns

‘Tips for recreating your beautiful sugar embroidery patterns please’, is a request I have received a few times recently. Many people seems to love my ‘Fair Isle & Beyond’ set of mini cakes – they have even bought the embroidery grid embosser so they can have a go… BUT it seems some people get a little stuck on how to proceed. Let me help you out with a few sugar embroidery pattern tips, but first a little background:

The idea – the pattern inspirations

Mixing traditional styles with new ideas is one of the things I love doing when designing cakes and  often I find my inspiration close to home. In this case a pair of gorgeous colourful knitted slippers and a woolly hat that really appealed to me. I later realised that these knitted pattern were a modern take on a traditional Fair Isle design. This style is often seen on knitted sweaters and is named after the tiny island where it originated, which lies halfway between Shetland and Orkney, off the Scottish coast. It was whilst I was researching ‘Fair Isle’ that I discovered other patterns and styles. So I decided to create two cakes, one with a Fair Isle theme and one more ornate, folk art theme, to show you what else is possible using the same design process.

I hope my sugar interpretation of these lovely patterns inspires you to create your own.

Creating the piped sugar embroidery patterns

These two pretty cakes are simply covered with sugarpaste and then a band of grid embossed modelling paste is wrapped around the sides to create the canvas on which the patterns are added. The designs themselves are then simply created by piping small dots onto the square grid either referring to a paper pattern or freehand.

To find out how to create your own sugar embroidery design and create the embossed sugar grid please watch my video.

For the royal icing recipe and to learn about the correct consistency of royal icing please visit my ‘Tips for piping with Royal Icing blog.

Products you might find useful to create your own sugar embroidery:

Embroidery grid embosser

Lindy’s 1mm spacers

Lindy’s ‘Mini Cakes Academy’ book

As I say in the video, sugar embroidery is not a quick sugarcraft technique but it is highly enjoyable and extremely therapeutic. I hope you feel inspired to try it out for yourself.

Sweet wishes
Lindy Smith

‘Bringing world-class sugarcraft to your kitchen’