Easy Lace Cake Decorating Tutorial

In this post, I am going to share another lace cake decorating idea using fondant strips. And by lace strips, I mean intricate lace patterns piped on strips of fondant to make them look like real lace.

These strips would work well on any part of a fondant covered cake, particularly on the sides of a cake or as a border.

A strip of amber and orange fondant with royal icing lace piping

In this tutorial, I am showing you the step by step instructions of piping the lace onto pieces of fondant strips. But when you do it on a real cake, you have a choice of either attaching the fondant strips onto your cake and then piping the lace patterns on it, or you can even pipe the lace directly onto your fondant-covered cake, which means you don’t really need to cut out the strips of fondant first. Either way, you need to get the fondant on the cake first before you start piping.

Lace Cake Decorating Guide

These are the main supplies needed for this lace technique:

Scallop Lace Cutter
Fondant
Royal icing
Wilton round tip #2

We start with the red lace first. I used a scallop cutter to cut the sides of the lace.

A strip of orange fondant cut into scallops

Next, pipe royal icing border along the scallops.

A strip of orange fondant with royal icing border piping

Inside each scallop, pipe a tiny ‘fleur-de-lis’ pattern.

A strip of orange fondant with royal icing lace piping

If you are not sure how to pipe a ‘fleur-de-lis’, follow the diagram below. Start with a straight line. Next pipe two extensions on both sides of the straight line, but make sure the lines are shorter than the middle one.

Once that is done, I then piped tiny ‘exclamation patterns’ on both the top and bottom of the lace.

I then repeated the ‘fleur-de-lis’ patterns in the center of the lace, running from one end to the other. Notice that the patterns are piped in sets of two, with each pattern facing the opposite direction.

And the lace is ready.

Here is another lace cake decorating pattern. For this pattern, you start piping from the center of the fondant strip.

A strip of amber fondant with royal icing lace piping

First, you need to mark the dots on the lace using a toothpick or a skewer. You can use a ruler to guide you in marking the dots so that the gap between them is consistent. Pipe tiny dots of royal icing on the marked dots.

Once that is done, you move to the next layer of pattern which is the zig zag pattern. Use the dots as a guide to get uniform width for the zig zags.

Next, pipe the ‘fleur-de-lis’ patterns.

Finally, finish off the lace pattern with scallops piped on both edges of the lace, using the ‘fleur-de-lis’ patterns as a guide to determine the width of each scallop.