Designing your own edible toppers for cakes, cupcakes, drinks, and other edible treats is easier than ever with Canva. Whether you’d like to create edible printed logos for cupcakes, add your own personal photo to a birthday cake, or design seasonal edible prints for your bakes, Canva makes it quick and easy to design, format and print edible toppers! Creating custom edible toppers using Canva is a fun and valuable skill for any baker or edible printer - no graphic design experience is required!
This step-by-step guide applies to creating any type of circle edible topper and will show you exactly how to create and print your own designs using Canva. Perfect for bakers, cake decorators and anyone with an edible printer looking to offer custom, professional-quality edible toppers.
Please Note:- This guide applies to printing A4 edible sheets for cutting manually after printing only and is not a guide for pre-cut icing sheet templates, as these sheets require more specific placement to line up with the pre-cut circles. For more help with pre-cut templates email sales@edibleprintsupplies.co.uk with your order number.
Why Use Canva for Designing Edible Toppers?
- Beginner-friendly interface - no design experience needed!
- Cost-effective software - Canva has a completely free option with everything you need to get started, even the premium subscription is budget-friendly compared to other available software!
- Works on iOs, Android, Mac & PC - design your edible toppers on any device, including right from your mobile!
- Ideal for circular edible toppers - Canva has all the features needed to reformat your existing images into perfect circles.
- Easily add your own photos, logos and designs - personalise your edible toppers with your own existing designs by uploading any photos or images, or use the huge library of free stock options Canva has to offer!
What You'll Need to Start Designing and Printing Your Own Edible Toppers
- Canva (free or Pro) - you can use the desktop or app version, but you will need to first create an account.
- An edible printer - you can shop our range of edible printers here!
- Edible icing sheets or wafer paper
- Your own custom design - photos, images or logos saved on your device (or use designs available on Canva)
- Cutting tool - we recommend the Adjustable Circle Cutter
Watch the Video Tutorial: How to Create Edible Toppers (using Canva!)
Prefer to follow along with a video? See our step-by-step YouTube tutorial for a visual guide, taking you through exactly how to use Canva to size and design your toppers, ready for exporting and printing with your edible printer!
Prefer written instructions? No problem - we've covered all the steps more thoroughly in the guide below…
How to Create a Custom Template for Edible Toppers - @EdiblePrintSupplies on YouTube
Step 1: Download and Open Canva
Download Canva from the iOS App Store Google Play Store, or access it via desktop at canva.com. Once installed open up the app.
Canva App, as shown in the iOS App Store
Step 2: Create an A4 Portrait Document
To get started, click ‘Create’ On the top left of the Canva home screen. You’ll need a portrait A4 document to create your toppers on, so select ‘Document (A4 Portrait)’ to choose your document size. This will be your canvas for arranging your edible topper circles.
Select Document (A4 Portrait) on Canva
Step 3: Add Circular Frames
Now to create your circular frames for your designs to go inside. Select ‘Elements’ from the top of the left toolbar, then click the ‘Frames’ option at the top of this section and choose the circular frame - click and hold to drag this into your document.
Step 4: Resize the Frames
Next you will need to resize the circle frame to whichever size edible topper that you require by dragging the corner out or in. Canva will likely measure the size of your shapes in centimetres (cm) by default, which is displayed next to the frame when resizing. You can use this circle diameter size guide to ensure you get the frames the right size for your required topper size:
These sizes are slightly bigger than the perfect equivalent of inches to cm, as this allows a small margin for error when cutting your toppers out. The most popular topper size for cupcakes is 2 inch (or 5cm), so we've based our guide on this size. But the same method applies to any size topper, and you can cut them all out easily using our Adjustable Circle Cutter which can do any size from 1"-6"!
‘Elements’ option (labelled A), circular frame option (labelled B) and 5.1 cm circular frame (labelled C)
Step 5: Duplicate Your Circle Frames
The next step is to duplicate your circle frame to fill the page. You can do this by copying and pasting your first resized frame or using the duplicate option (two squares with + symbol) in the small tool bar which appears when the circle is selected. If you're creating 2 inch circles like in our example, it's best to rearrange them as 5 rows of 3 frames. Whatever the size of the circles you wish to use, it’s imperative for these to be evenly spread across the A4 document, with a small space in between each circle, so that there is ample room when cutting out your toppers, but don't forget to leave a clear margin around the outside to make sure none of your designs are cut off during printing.
15 x 2 inch (5.1 cm) evenly spaced frames
Step 6: Save A Copy of Your Template for Future Use
Once you've created your template, it might be a good idea to save a version now before you add any images. To do this, click ‘File’ > ‘Make a Copy’. Your copied version will open straight away. You can name this whatever you like and close it, before heading back to the original document to start adding your designs. Next time you want to create some edible toppers - your template is all laid out for you!
Step 7: Add Your Images and Designs to Your Cupcake Toppers
To add your own designs and images to the circles in the edible topper template, first upload the images that you’d like to be on your topper. To do this, click ‘Uploads’ in the toolbar on the left-hand-size > click ‘Upload Files’ and choose your photo, logo or custom design from your files. You will then see your chosen images in the uploaded images section. Alternatively, you can type the design or theme you're looking for into the ‘Search elements’ bar within ‘Elements’ in the toolbar, and choose from the stock images of graphics and photos. (The standard Canva option (free) will have limited stock images, but the paid-for Pro version has hundreds of stock images to choose from!)
Top tip - it works best if your images are square to begin with so they fit perfectly in the centre of the circle, but don't worry, you can resize and crop for the perfect fit.
Once uploaded, select your chosen image or photo from ‘Uploads’ or ‘Elements’ and click and hold to drag the image into one of frames. Repeat this step for all of the designs you wish to include in the print-out.
If your toppers have a coloured background, they’re ready to print as soon as they’ve been placed within your frames as they don't need a guideline, so you can skip to step 8.
If your image has a white background, such as text, logos or a cut-out photo/sticker, follow step 7 to add guidelines to help with cutting.
‘Uploads’ option (A), uploaded design area (B) and selected design being dragged into a frame (C)
Step 8: Add Cutting Guidelines for White Background Designs.
If your topper design has a white background, you’ll need to place a thin border around your design. This is to make cutting out the toppers a smoother and easier process – as you’ll have a guideline where to align and cut with your cutting tools, such as the Adjustable Circle Cutter.
We've covered how to add cutting guidelines to your edible toppers below…
1) Add Border - make sure you have added your white-background design into one of the frames in the same way as in step 7. Then click on this filled frame, select ‘Stroke Style’ from the toolbar above (symbol with 3 solid horizontal lines). Adjust the slider for ‘Stroke weight’ to 1 for a fine border (if you do want visible thicker border on your toppers, you can make this thicker as desired). We also recommend editing the colour of your cutting guideline to a lighter grey by selecting ‘Stroke colour’ (see diagram below) and choosing a light grey from the colours on the left side of the page. This will mean the border is less visible if you don't manage to cut your edible topper exactly right later, so they don't go to waste!
2) Copy to Other Circles - If you want to create more of this same design, add another white background image to the next frame, then right click on the first finished design with the grey border, press ‘Copy style’ from the available options and then left click onto the next frame to quickly add the border to this design. Repeat this step for all of the circles you wish to have this design.
Light grey colour selector (A), bordered white design (B) and ‘Stroke colour’ tool - adjacent to ‘Stroke style’ tool (C).
Step 9: Export and Print Your Edible Toppers
Once all frames have been filled with your chosen cupcake designs, are sized correctly and bordered if required, you’re ready to print off your toppers! To save your file to print, click ‘Share’ in the top right corner > ‘Download’ and choose your ‘file type’ - we recommend selecting 'PDF Print' and leaving the rest of the settings as default.
Open your saved PDF design and print onto your chosen edible paper. If you're creating edible toppers for cupcakes, we recommend icing sheets for the best quality prints, like EPS Premium Easy Peel Icing Sheets; however, wafer paper or wafer card can be cost-effective alternate option and also work with most cake coverings. For drink toppers, we recommend EPS Wafer Paper or EPS Wafer Card. You may wish to experiment with the print settings on regular paper to see how the colours look before printing your toppers - we have a guide on ‘How to Improve the Quality of your Edible Images’ if your edible toppers aren't printing the way you like.
Step 10: Cut Out Your Edible Toppers
Once printed, leave your edible toppers until the edible ink is completely dry before cutting them out. We recommend using the Adjustable Circle Cutter for Edible Toppers to get perfectly sized, perfect circles. For more help on how to cut out edible toppers see our cutting guide here.
Custom Printed Edible Topper Design on an EPS Icing Sheet
For further instruction and a more visual tutorial, we’d recommend that you check out our YouTube tutorial on How to Create a Custom Template for Edible Toppers using Canva in the video above.
Need Inspiration?
We have a range of seasonal and themed edible topper templates with tons of designs ready-made, which you can purchase alongside your edible printing products - find them in the ‘Printable Templates’ section on our website. Plus, spend £50 on our website and choose a template design completely free!
Need Help or More Tips?
Still need help creating a template for your edible toppers? Our team would be happy to help - drop us an email at sales@edibleprintsupplies.co.uk with your order number and our friendly support team will get back to you! Want more tips and tricks like this? Sign up here to get them straight to your inbox!