Laser cutting icing

I was thinking about what sort of things I could put in the laser cutter (as I do alot). And as it's Christmas theres alot of cakes around. This reminded me of someone who put a cakes in a laser cutter. I didn't have full cake to play with but we did have an undecorated one.

So I brought up a few KG's of icing and got planing.

Icing is made of suger right. Heat suger makes caremel or somthing and my laser is infered. Lets call that the back up plan. To start with I just layed out some iceing went for nice and thin to aid cutting, to finish it off I placed it on 2 layers of foil. I did concider a baking tray but really didn't want to find out what deadly cemicals it would make, foil should be fine.

All set to go.

Setting the laser to as low as it will I did a pass and...

It worked it's very faint but there is an out line.

Now I know it won't catch fire I have more confidence. More POWER!

Wow This might just work, so it can engrave stuff but what about cutting? Enought of the patterence lets do a square to make it easy.

More power!

Cut! Made a cut in it!

Not to put a downer on the success but...

Fried the hell out of the edges. You could see the sugar bubbling when it was doing a pass. Also it it glued it to the foil. It does taste fantastic!

Maybe cutting it was a little bit too much. Engraving on the other hand that came out quite nicely at low power. Time to do somthing usefull. How about a tree for our cake.

Thats looking good springly a icing sugar before you laser to add more contrast. This wasn't cut by the laser I used the outline from etching and used a knife to cut it out.

That concludes it I think. For settings you will have to try that yourself start low I dosn't take much to etch it. For cutting it's better to use a low power and lots of passes take it a bit at a time, also if you can make the tool path long then it gives the sugar time to solidify.

Have fun, be safe.