Something a little bit different. This is a cake icing decorating stamp, or more correctly it makes a diamond imprint into the icing to make a quilt type pattern.

A friend, who is a master cake maker, buys the propriety stamps which are flat, and made of a fragile plastic. They have a number of diamond shapes to enable a large area to be imprinted, but the problem is that the plastic breaks when imprinting a curved area. So I was asked to make one segment which would enable the imprint to be made with a lot more precision, and which could be built up as required.

I made the stamp out of black Acetal which is food grade. It was a little trickier to make than I thought, because it is a diamond not a square, the sides are approximately 5 degrees off square. A 3mm end mill was used to rough out the middle and using the simple dividing head I angled the Acetal block to make the basic shape. I then used a small 90 degree chamferring cutter to make the sharp edges, and milled out the back face to make alignment easier. The chamferring cutter worked well on the outer edges, but left a radius on the inside edge which had to be cut out with a scalpel to give a sharp inner corner.

And just to prove it actually worked, the cake master made me a cake! It tasted as nice as it looks too!