How do they print pictures in birthday cake icing?
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They use the same technology & methodology as your regular desktop inkjet printer but the ink is edible. The ink is also in liquid form and is designed to sit on top of food. It is slightly more gelatinous than printer ink.
Canon have a number of “Edible Printers” & Inks that you can buy. It’s as simple as filling the tanks, preparing icing [the print target] to an appropriate thickness, loading the image to the printer and hitting print. The “print head” moves along the surface in lines and drops a calculated combination of the source inks, at every point in the image – just like a regular printer does.
Unlike an inkjet printer, which can get really close to the paper, these printers need to sort of “spray” their inks from a tiny bit further away to allow for imperfections/pitting in the target icing. This makes the DPI [the quality, so to say] of an icing print really low & can give you a kind of “dotted”, “blurry” effect.
These printers do have modifications to suit the needs of the print: for instance, you want to be able to clean any device used in the production of food. There will also be maintenance routines (like flushing) that you would need to do on a regular basis too in order to keep it sanitary.
They use a printer that uses edible ink and paper made of sugar instead of wood pulp.
The picture gets printed onto the sugar sheet.
The sheet is placed on top of the frosted cake.
The sugar sheet dissolves into the frosting, leaving the picture behind.
Similarly, when my mom did cakes, she had a machine called a Copy Cake (I think) and it would project images from a paper onto the cake! She could pipe with the icing on the cake with buttercream instead of using fondant or a sugar sheet!
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