The Contemporary Buttercream Bible (34 page)

The Fishnet Lace variation uses a piping pattern

that creates connected diamonds, and we have a

surprisingly easy way to achieve this effect. To make it even more interesting, we used three shades of

pink-tinted buttercream to give a gradient result.

Irregular Lace

1 Put black-tinted buttercream in a piping bag with

or without a nozzle. You can use writing nozzle

number 0 or 1. If you are not using a nozzle, cut a

tiny hole at the tip of your piping bag and squeeze it onto a tissue until you get the desired thickness of

the lines (A and B).

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A

B

2 Place the tip of your piping bag or your nozzle

very close to the surface of the cake so that the

buttercream sticks to the cake and you avoid

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curling. Start by piping a single irregular small

circle (C).

C

3 Continue piping small irregular circles next to

each other (D). Try not to lift the bag away from the cake between circles as this will create peaks or

‘spikes’. See the tip in the Fishnet Lace tutorial for dealing with these.

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D

4 Continue to build up the circles making sure that

all lines are connected. In this project, we started

with small circles, which gradually become bigger

towards the bottom of the cake (E).

E

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Tip

Make sure that the buttercream is lightly

thinned (add few drops of water) so it becomes

slightly runny and it flows smoothly.

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To create this cake…

• 25 × 7.5cm (10 × 3in) round cake (bottom tier),

20 × 15cm (8 × 6in) round cake (middle tier), 15 ×

10cm (6 × 4in) round cake (top tier)

• 800g–1.5kg (1lb 12oz–3lb 5oz) buttercream

• Dowel rods

• Paste colours: black (Sugarflair Liquorice) green

(Sugarflair Gooseberry or Spruce Green), yellow

(Sugarflair Autumn Leaf), pink (Sugarflair Claret)

and orange (Sugarflair Egyptian Orange)

• Writing nozzles, 0, 1 or 1.5

• Small petal nozzles (Wilton 104)

• Small leaf nozzle (Wilton 104)

• Piping bags

• Cake stand or covered cake board

Cover the cakes with a smooth finish (see Covering

Cakes in Buttercream Basics), dowel and stack

them (see Dowelling in Buttercream Basics) and

place on a stand or covered board. Colour

200–300g (7–101⁄2oz) of buttercream black and add

a little water to thin it. Pipe the lace as described in the tutorial, making it increasingly dense on the

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middle and top tiers. Colour 300–400g (101⁄2–14oz)

of buttercream in orange, pink and yellow, and use

the small petal nozzle to pipe roses on the edge of

the bottom and middle tiers and in the centre of the

top tier, and add leaves in green using the small leaf nozzle (see Rose and Rose Bud in Piping Flowers).

To finish, pipe a border at the base in black (see

Scrolls, Lines and Zigzags in Piping Texture and

Patterns).

Fishnet Lace

1 Prepare tinted buttercream in a couple of gradient

colours and place in piping bags. You can use

writing nozzle number 0 or 1. If you are not using

any nozzle, just cut a tiny hole at the tip of your

piping bag and squeeze it onto a tissue until you get the desired thickness of the lines (see Step 1,

Irregular Lace).

2 Starting from the upper left corner of the cake and using the darkest shade of your tinted buttercream

(or the lightest), pipe even sized zigzag lines

horizontally (A).

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A

3 Use the same process to pipe zigzag lines below

your first row giving the impression of a diamond

shape. Make sure that the points meet (B).

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B

4 After piping a few of rows of ‘diamonds’, change

to the next shade of buttercream and repeat the

steps to build up the pattern (C).

C

5 To create borders or ‘seams’ in the fishnet effect, pipe thicker lines by applying more pressure to the

piping bag as you work (D).

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