Cake Topper Tutorial

Please be aware that this blog post contains affiliate links and any purchases made through such links will result in a small commission for me (at no extra cost for you).

Cake is the best. Like really the absolute best!

I have had so much fun making some cake toppers for my friends who are bakers. I like cutting paper with my Silhouette Cameo and it is so fun to see the finished product on a beautiful cake. Today, I’m going to tell you how to make a cursive cake topper.

If you need help cutting paper with your Silhouette machine, look at my post here.

The materials you’ll need:

• Silhouette or cutting machine (link here)
•  Glitter Cardstock (link here)
• 6″ skewers/toothpicks (link here)
• hot glue gun (link here)
• cake

First you have to decide on a cursive font. That is always the hardest part for me. I am a font hoarder! The important factor on choosing a font is you want at least 2 points to overlap if your stacking the words. I am writing Happy Birthday for mine. Here it is typed and centered in the text box.

In the next picture you can see where my letters are overlapping. You can use the line spacing option in the font panel or you can weld the text and move the two words seperatly.

Next you need to go to the modify panel (looks like a rectangle and a circle overlapping) and weld the text together. In my example, you can see that the B from birthday and the dot on the i are also separate and they need to be overlapped and welded to the rest as well. Here is what it looks like.

I decided that this was too thin of a font, so I used the offset panel (it is shaped like a star) and I did the outside offset at 0.020. Then it looked like this.

It gets a lot thicker and gave me better connection points. If I didn’t have that it might not stand up well and would be droopy. No one wants that.

The next step is to open the mirror panel and mirror the design so you have a front and back piece that can go together like a sandwich. This is what the two pieces will look like.

Send that to cut and ALWAYS test cut if you’re using a special paper. I have ruined enough paper to say all glitter paper needs a slightly different cut setting. Make sure that it is cutting all the way through with a very crisp line. I usually end up adding an extra cut or I put the blade up one step higher than the recommended settings in Silhouette Studio.

I always use a low temp hot glue to put my cake toppers together. To hold the topper in the cake, you can use bamboo skewers or extra long toothpicks. I have also purchased cake toppers from the clearance rack that were left over from holidays and took the clear plastic skewer off those.

I always lay down the back side on my counter first. Then hot glue the skewers to the back side. I usually put 2 in all my longer toppers. The black circles in the picture below show where I would place the skewers for this design.

Then I hot glue the top on above the skewers first, then I use dots of hot glue to hold the rest of the letters together.

Then that cake topper is ready for some cake! Here are some pictures of the cake toppers I have made. I love how fun they are to make!