You could even attach a repeating pattern to a rolling pin !
2 Likes
Yes. I can see this. Engrave a silicone mat and adhere that to a pin. Genius. Also a cool thought. Magnets so you could swap out designs on the fly and save storage space if you have multiple emboss patterns
2 Likes
Brilliant! I also thought about cutting cookie cutters (Acrylic). I’ve seen and bought cookie cutters made from 3D Printers, they are great but it takes quite a long time.
1 Like
Hmmm, if you can sinter with a laser, you should be able to caramelize sugar. Perhaps a particularly fancy creme brulee? I could see designs in the top of cookies for anybody who needs to one-up the over competitive school mom: take that perfectly frosted cupcake!
As regards chocolate, Dan has mentioned in interviews that they’ve engraved it, but they stick it in the freezer first. I make chocolate enrobbed truffles every holiday season and freezing (and quickly defrosting) the centers is a no-no, but a quick cool down would be okay. Cleaning up the edges of hand dipped chocolates would be a useful overkill of a laser as long as the laser doesn’t bring the edge of the chocolate out of temper. That would require a focused laser beam more than a 1/2" away, however. For us candy makers, cutting a slab of caramel would be awesome. It is such a pain to cut something that sticky and maintain a decent shape. It would certainly cut down my labor if it could slice through my slabbed truffle centers without breaking them. Now that I think of it, my toffee is never remotely uniform. If it could slice through that to get either uniform pieces or shaped pieces… Maybe I’ll need a basic next fall.
Imagine how weird perfect squares of brittle would be.
I think a rolling pin would be too thick for the machine
Hi Xabbess, Yes - a rolling pin would be too thick. What Cecilia suggested was to engrave rubber stamp and attach the rubber to the rolling pin 
(Brilliant Idea)
2 Likes
The problem with defocusing the laser to cook bacon or other meats is the mess it would make. Think about the spatter and mess you get on the stove when you cook, do you really want that inside your laser cutter? Aside from basic messiness, it could screw up optics/mirrors.
I’ve never dabbled in putting food in the laser, but a fellow maker at the space I use once told me that the less moisture the better. Your mileage may vary, of course.
How would you do that? It doesn’t cut very deep. And most cookie cutters i know are at least and inch deep
Hi Cecilia. I saw it being done by stacking. So essentially you would cut the same pattern 2 times or 3 depending on how high you want the cookie cutter. And then join them.
I was wondering this too!! I like to decorate cakes and cupcakes as a hobby, and I was planning to see if fondant or gumpaste would work. We should create a Foodies group!
1 Like
Yes! I love the idea of a Foodie Group!
This is probably stupid, but I’m new to laser cutting. Why should there be a separate laser device for food vs non-food? Is it so there is no possibility of having non-food items end up on food items? What if you prepared and cleaned the honeycomb bed appropriately, would it be okay to do food in the same machine? Or is there some other reason besides this common sense one that I am missing?
Not stupid at all. A lot of what gets cuts in a laser cutter gives off toxic fumes as part of the process. No guarantee some of that wouldn’t get in the food. Not to mention, laser cutters do not smell good.
@jrnelson so it’s not the concern that a previously cut item would contaminate the food, but the food item itself could have a reaction that puts off harmful fumes? Huh. I wonder how we could test that. (Nerd alert.)
No you have it right with the first one. The concern is that the inside of the GF would be insufficiently clean to put food in.
Are there things one can do to make it sufficiently clean?
Depends. You could probably leave a plate full of activated carbon in there that might help, and take a bottle of ethanol, dampen a cloth, and wipe down everything that isn’t the laser in the cavity.
But even then you couldn’t be 100% certain without taking swabs and air samples and sending them for analysis.
To be honest, this is erring substantially on the side of caution; if you’re only lasering papercraft it’ll be fine, but if you only laser acrylic, well…
It’s probably fine to go ahead and do whatever you like with regards to food, as long as you do it with a measure of common sense. Having said that, if I were doing this with an eye to selling the lasered food items, I absolutely would have a separate food only laser.
LASER BACON, y’all. Plus some other things, like a new way of lasering nori to achieve sushi designs when you cut a cross section:
1 Like
I really want to laser engrave a Pepperidge Farms Mint Milano cookie down to the chocolate layer. It would be like working with flash glass.