If you’ve been in Michael’s Craft Store, you’ve seen the wide variety of gorgeous print papers available for scrapbooking. There are so many different paper crafts you can create with these beautiful designer prints and now you can even take them to your kitchen. Designer prints can be printed in food coloring on edible paper or icing sheets. These thin sheets of icing are backed by plastic and can go through a printer to print out any design you like.
The printing process is only different in the type of cartridges that are used. Food coloring filled edible ink cartridges can be used in a regular printer as long as the printer has not been used with ink. Ink contains toxins that are not food-safe, so you’ll want to have a printer exclusively for printing edible images.
IIDesigns is a line of designer prints that is downloaded to your computer and printed on the icing sheets. Once the sheets are printed, you can cut them, apply them to fondant, gum paste, icing, cookies, cakes, cupcakes, etc. You can even scan a design and print it out on the icing sheets. The icing sheets come in 8-1/2†x 11†sheets, legal size, and a variety of pre-cut circles and rectangles all on the same sheet.
How to Apply Them
One side of the icing sheet is the side where you will print the image. The other side will remain attached to a plastic backing to protect it. When you are done printing, you can then cut out shapes with scissors or stampers available from any craft store. Peel off the backing and apply a light coat of piping gel. Then apply the design where desired on a cake, cookie, cupcake, etc.
Design Idea
Let’s say you want to create a cake with an animal print all around the sides. After printing the animal print design, you will cut the icing sheet to the height of the cake. Peel the plastic, apply the piping gel and apply by carefully lining up the bottom of the icing sheet strip with the bottom of the cake. Smooth the icing sheet in an upward direction. If any part of the icing sheet comes above the top of the cake, trim it with scissors. Then line up the next strip of animal print where the last strip ended. When the design is all around the cake sides, finish the top and bottom borders with a black fondant trim. You can use a clay gun to quickly push out a rope of fondant, twist it and apply it to the edge of the cake. Another idea is to roll fondant balls. This is done by rolling out a thin sausage of fondant and cutting it into evenly sized pieces. Roll each piece in the palm of your hand to create a ball. Apply to cake with a touch of water or piping gel.
You can go as simple or as elegant as you like. Just think about creating a Monet cake by printing out Monet’s “Water Lilies†painting on an icing sheet. There’s no limit to what you can create and something so simple can look like a work of art that took many hours to create.
Theresa Happe works with Icing Images, a company that supplies edible ink and paper to create edible images for decorating cakes, cupcakes, cookies and more.