Basic Decorating Techniques - Basketweave

Here is a clever technique that lets you turn the side of a cake into a rustic-looking basket. You simply combine long vertical stripes of icing with short horizontal bars to produce edible basketweaving.
Getting Ready

Set up your practice board. Insert a coupler base in your Featherweight bag and lock basketweave tip 47 onto it with your coupler ring.

Fill your bag half full with medium consistency Buttercream Icing for practice.


Tip: 47
Icing: medium consistency
Positions:
- Bag: 45° angle at 6:00 for vertical strips, at 3:00(9:00) for horizontal bars
- Tip: lightly touching surface, serrated side up

Sequence:
1. Squeeze evenly, vertically.
2. Stop squeezing.
3. Lift tip away.
4. Squeeze evenly, horizontally across vertical strip.
5. Stop squeezing.
6. Lift tip away.

With bag in 6:00 position, squeeze out a vertical strip of icing. With bag in 3:00 (9:00) position, squeeze out short horizontal bars across the vertical bar. Spacing between the horizontal bars should be the same as the width of the tip. To expand the basketweave pattern, simply repeat the two previous steps, one vertical bar at a time. Note that each new set of horizontal bars fits between the horizontal bars of the previous set.

When you make the basketweave pattern, be sure that your horizontal bars are long enough so that the next vertical strip can cover their ends without breaking the evenness of the pattern.

That's how you get a deep, three-dimensional look. After you have practiced your basketweave on a flat surface, try it on your upright board so you get the feel of doing it on the side of a cake. When covering the side of a real cake with the basketweave patten, start at the base of the cake and work your way up.