Sugar artist Lucie Radcliffe turns cookies into masterpieces
The founder of Lucie Bakes is a graphic designer by trade
Lucie Radcliffe of Lucie Bakes honoured her late grandmother with her Gramma cookie.
THE FIRST TIME Lucie Radcliffe painted a portrait onto a cookie, the process took her eight hours. Today, it takes the sugar artist who grew to fame over Instagram as Lucie Bakes as little as an hour or two to create strikingly realistic cookie portraits of anyone from Kamala Harris to Will Ferrell’s Buddy the Elf.
Originally a graphic designer by trade, Radcliffe seized the opportunity to turn Lucie Bakes into her full-time business when she was let go from her marketing design job during the pandemic. She now has a dedicated Instagram fanbase of over 80,000 followers. Despite working with baked goods, Radcliffe chooses to use the title “sugar artist” rather than “baker” because it gives people a more accurate depiction of what she does for a living.
“I’ve just found that throughout the past couple years, the term ‘baker’ has become really misleading,” says Radcliffe. “So I usually try to describe it as like, ‘Well, I bake, but not really for anyone. It’s more of an art.’”
Meryl Streep cookie by Lucie Bakes.
Radcliffe’s creative streak began when she was young. She received a cookbook for Christmas in Grade four, and spent much of her childhood baking. After graduating from the arts program at Lord Byng Secondary School, Radcliffe took a two-year hiatus from artistic endeavours before delving back into it at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, where she enrolled in the graphic design program for marketing.
Post-graduation, she landed a job creating packaging designs for health- and fitness-supplement brands. There, Radcliffe became close friends with her art director, who had a passion for making homemade soap and ran an Instagram page for her practice. Radcliffe eventually followed suit, creating an Instagram account for her decorated baked goods, and Lucie Bakes was born.
Radcliffe recalls her inaugural portrait cookie (which is what garners the most attention on her Instagram) being a shirtless man on the cover of a romance novel for an author’s book-release promotion, which she drew entirely freehand by copying a photograph. That method of decorating was extremely time-consuming and overwhelming, so since then, the sugar artist has started using a projector to cast photos of her designs onto cookies.
Shoe cookies by Lucie Bakes.
The images she projects for tracing are usually mock-up sketches made in Adobe Illustrator, a software that Radcliffe credits her graphic-design background for teaching her how to use.
She also 3D-prints her own cookie cutters — a skill that her husband, who’s an engineer, helped teach her. The pair have now built up a fleet of 15 at-home 3D printers for the task. Radcliffe first designs 2D images of the cutters in Adobe Illustrator before printing and listing them for sale via her online shop.
“Those are all manufactured right there behind me,” Radcliffe tells Stir over a Zoom call, motioning to a colourful wall of cookie cutters in the backdrop of her home. “What I really like about that is I could design certain cookies exactly how I wanted, and the exact shape and size that I wanted.”
Making cookie cutter shapes that are unique is an important aspect of the process, says Radcliffe, given that common shapes are fairly easy to find at other stores. Among the cutters she sells are those related to liquor, such as champagne bottles and wine glasses; classic cars, including an Oldsmobile 442 and an AC Cobra; and specialty items, like Frappuccino cups, peacock feathers, and even a 3D Elf on the Shelf.
Radcliffe’s business has continued to expand over time; she now teaches livestream workshops on how to replicate some of her art designs on cookies so people can learn the step-by-step basics of the complex process.
Lucie Radcliffe.
Back in 2019, Radcliffe’s unique designs caught the eyes of casting scouts for the hit Food Network show Christmas Cookie Challenge, and she made it on the show while she was still working her full-time marketing design job. Radcliffe was riding the bus when she got the offer to compete on an episode in Hollywood, L.A.
“They called me the week before I had to be there, and they were like, ‘Wanna come down next Friday?’ And I was like, ‘Lemme ask my boss, let me make sure that’s okay!’ laughs Radcliffe.
She says it was a nerve-wracking experience flying to L.A. by herself, and recalls all the thoughts swirling around in her head: Who would she be competing against? What would the set be like? What would the crew be like? Were the time constraints real? Radcliffe won the episode, which she says was both an astounding and incredibly validating moment.
“It’s probably the most fun experience I’ve ever had in my entire life,” says Radcliffe. “Aside from winning that time — if I hadn’t won, it still would have been the most fun. Winning was just a bonus.”
Lucie Bakes.
Radcliffe was invited back to Christmas Cookie Challenge in 2021 to compete on an all-stars episode, this time filmed in Knoxville, Tennessee. Because she knew what to expect the second time around, and her competitors were familiar faces she’d seen on previous episodes, Radcliffe says it was an even more exciting experience than the first.
An aspect of the show that Radcliffe says was just as stressful as it looks on television is the time constraints for each round of the competition.
“Making the dough, chilling the dough, rolling it, cutting it, baking it, making all the icing, making all of the icing colours, and then decorating all of your cookies hoping that they’ll actually bake properly—and doing that in two hours—is so incredibly tight,” says Radcliffe. “Like, that’s something I would do over an entire day at home.”
Radcliffe says her biggest takeaway was the friendships she formed with the other contestants. Because she runs her business online, there are always opportunities to form relationships with other sugar artists through social media, she says, but meeting in person allows for a different type of connection.
As for the near future of Lucie Bakes, Radcliffe says she’ll be taking it easy this year to allow more time for her personal life.
“I don’t have anything huge planned right now: I’m actually pregnant with twins,” shares Radcliffe, a revelation she announced to her followers in March by posting a photo of a cookie she painted to replicate her ultrasound image. “So once the summer comes, I’ll kind of have to step back and just do the baby thing for a month. And I’ll keep things going, but it certainly will be nothing big happening for at least the latter half of this year.”
Lucie Bakes.
Radcliffe says she plans on making a baby shower cookie-cutter collection to commemorate the moment, as well as a wedding collection for her sister’s upcoming summer marriage. Aside from special moments in her own life, some of the inspiration for her designs comes from what she sees around her on other baker’s accounts, in pop culture, and during different seasons of the year.
For Radcliffe, the endless possibilities of decorating cookies are what she continues to enjoy most about her craft.
“It’s like a blank canvas. You can literally put anything on it; you can even make 3D objects,” says Radcliffe. “I’ve done a cookie pick-up truck, 3D trees, and stuff like that. So it’s really just an unlimited number of options to what you can create all using the same type of medium, which is different than a lot of other art forms.”
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