Photo Cakes

www.cobornsblog.com The art of Cakes with Amanda

Amanda

Celebrate someone or embarrass someone. We have that power. With our photo printing system we can add a special touch to anyone’s cake. I’ve added pictures of adorable babies and toothless elementary students from the 1950’s to cakes. Vintage wedding photos look amazing when bordered with roses on an anniversary cake. Have a picture of your best friend from the 80’s in their acid washed jeans and crimped hair? Let’s put it on their cake!

I’d like to give you some tips on the do and don’ts of getting one of these fun cakes.

First, how does work? Well, the most important thing you should know is we won’t be harming your photo. It’s all digital as far as resizing and making things edible. All your decorator needs is either a physical print of the photo you want or a digital copy. Our machines have CD drives, USB ports and slots for memory cards.

Things to know about choosing digital photo files for your cake. Our machine only recognizes jpg format. So, if you spend time making your own fun photo collage with borders and writing, please remember to save it as a jpg so our machine can read it. There are ways we could force it to work, but remember, not all of us decorators are technology wizards. We are frosting wizards! You can also make this process a little smoother by bringing in only the photo files you’d like us to use. My machine won’t keep the photos neatly organized into folders like you see on your computer. I’ll have to look through thumbnails of all 227 photo of your family vacation to find that one funny picture of your mom hulu dancing. If you can’t make it into the store or your picture is hanging out on your cellphone you can also ask your bakery for their email address and send the photo to them via email attachment. This is a great option for phone orders.

If you have a paper photo you would like used we have a scanner on our photo machines. Sometimes people bring me in items for scanning that have been folded in half, they have scratches or discoloration. I don’t have a photo program to fix these flaws. The scanner will pick these up and you will see them in the print. I can’t adjust color or do any touchups to old photos as much as I’d like to do minor adjustments. Also, I wouldn’t recommend printing off the photo at home on computer paper and bringing that in. These typically end up with small lines running through them, a quality issue on the cake. If the photo is on your computer it would be best to get us the digital copy to use, the final print on the cake will look much better. Remember, we are printing on edible paper with edible ink and then letting the image melt into the frosting. The better the starter image the better the final result. Long story short, when we scan your photo, the scan is as good as the image we start with.

Once we have your photo on our screen we can resize, crop the photo, add words, or frame it with a variety of digital options. After we’ve gotten the picture to our liking we just hit the print button. We can print on sheets of paper approximately the size of traditional computer paper. I also use sheets with 3 inch circles or 2 inch circle from time to time. These are great for decorating cookies or even cupcakes.

After the printer rolls out my edible image it’s time to get the scissors and trim it up. From here we apply the photo to fresh frosting. After a few hours the image will meld into the frosting becoming less paper like and more like a screen printed image that is part of the cake. From here we can decorate, decorate, decorate! If you see a design in your bakery, let’s say a graduation cake, that doesn’t have a picture, the decorator can usually rework the design to fit in your picture. So, if you have a picture you really want to use, bring it into the store. We can work it in to existing designs or even better, design a whole cake around your unique photo.

One last thing I should mention is the main limitation of our photo printing. While we love making your photos in to cake decorations or using one of our hundreds of photo cake character designs, we can’t go too nuts as far as making copies go. We aren’t allowed to scan your invites or paper plates with your favorite character on it, just like we can’t grab images from online or free hand draw or sculpt them. I know sometimes the little ones get their heart set on a very specific image for their birthday cake, but copy write laws just don’t allow for us to do some things. But our creative cake designers would love to talk about the many, many, other options we can provide for cake happiness.

Amanda
Coborn’s Cake Decorator
Sartell, MN – Pine Cone Road

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www.cobornsblog.com - The Art of Cakes with Amanda