Edible ink is used to print on wafer paper or icing sheets for cake decorations. It’s basically made from food coloring and some other ingredients, but what are those other ingredients?
With the recent rise in food sensitivities and allergies, it’s good to know what you’re going to be eating if you decide to eat the wafer paper on the cake or cookies!
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What are the ingredients in edible inks?
Edible ink is basically a mixture of water, food coloring, preservatives, and softeners that’s formulated to help the liquid go through the printer without clogging the print head and ink nozzles.
Everything in it is food-grade and classified under the “generally recognized as safe” category so that it can print on edible materials and be used in cake and cookie decorating.
Each cartridge of edible ink that I use (I get mine from Icing Images, but there are many sources) has the following ingredients:
- Water
- Food-Grade Glycerin
- Polypropylene Glycol
- FD&C approved food coloring (different colors)
- Citric Acid
- Potassium Sorbate
Each of these ingredients serves a specific purpose, and they’re all food-grade.
The water is the base of the mix, obviously, and serves as the medium for everything else to be dissolved in!
Glycerin and Polypropylene Glycol are softeners that keep the ink flowing through the printer.
Glycerin is a plant-based food additive that keeps things soft, and it’s used a lot in cake decorating for different things.
Polypropylene glycol is a chemical that’s categorized as “generally accepted as safe” for food use. That means that in small amounts it’s not considered harmful, but this is the one ingredient that could be controversial.
In the amount that’s in the edible ink, I’m not concerned about it. One edible ink cartridge can print a lot of pages, so the amount of each ingredient in the ink is going to be EXTREMELY small, and you won’t get very much of it on each piece of wafer paper.
However, if you’re concerned about polypropylene glycol for whatever reason, you should be aware that it’s an ingredient in edible inks, even if it is a teeny amount.
All of these ingredients are gluten-free, plant-based, and the inks themselves are kosher. My workspace is NOT a kosher-certified kitchen, however!
The food colorings are specific to each color of ink, but these are FD&C food colorings that are used in food all the time. If you have concerns about what the specific type of dye is, feel free to contact me and I can check for you before you order any wafer paper from me.
Citric acid and potassium sorbate are used as preservatives to keep the color from changing and to keep the ink from spoiling. These have an acid effect that keeps bacteria from growing in the ink over time.
All of the ingredients in the inks I use are things that I would feel fine letting my own kids eat if they were still little kids, but if you have any reason to think that there could be a food sensitivity or allergy to any ingredient in them, it’s best to avoid them.
How does edible ink work?
Edible ink comes from companies that manufacture it specifically to use in certain printer models. You buy the pre-filled cartridges that fit into a regular printer, and you print from a computer the same way you’d print a regular non-edible image.
The medium that you print on needs to be edible, so that would be wafer paper or icing sheets.
The thing that you need to watch for when you’re printing an edible picture is the color balance, which can vary from printer to printer, and the nozzles in the printer getting clogged. (More about that in the next section.)
Other than that, edible ink works the same as regular printer cartridges. You put them in the printer the same way, but remember that the printer needs to be ONLY for edible inks. Once you use it with regular printer ink you can’t use it for edible ink because of the risk of cross-contamination.
For a full article of how edible ink printers work, click here.
Is edible ink different from regular printer ink?
Edible ink is totally different from regular printer ink. Regular ink has ingredients that aren’t food-grade, and some that are designed to keep the ink flowing through the printer without clogging the nozzles. Those chemicals aren’t meant to be eaten at all!
Because edible ink doesn’t have the same chemicals that non-edible printer ink has in it, it tends to clog the print head and the nozzles in the printer more frequently.
And if you don’t use the printer very often to keep the ink flowing through you can end up with a printer that needs to be cleaned out pretty often.
You also need to use different settings than a regular printer…Click here to read about that.
Edible inks also tend to be difficult to print 100% accurately for the colors that show on the computer they’re being printed from.
One of the most aggravating things about edible ink printers is that each one tends to print slightly differently, so you can’t even be guaranteed that the colors will print the same way twice.
Along with that, it’s pretty common for one of the colors to stop printing entirely, so you definitely have to plan on spending way more time cleaning the print head than you do with regular printers.
That’s because the food coloring ink is missing the chemicals that help it flow evenly through the nozzles without getting clogged over time…Those chemicals that prevent that are the toxic ones!
Edible ink is a good way to print on wafer paper and is used for a lot of cake decorating techniques, so it has a track history of being safe. It’s always good to know what’s in it, though, just in case you have a specific concern!
Wafer paper supply list:
Shop for materials to make wafer paper flowers on Amazon (#ad):
- Wafer paper, white or colored
- Silicone flower center molds
- Petal veiners
- Petal dust
- Floral wire
- Tylose glue
- Fluffy paintbrushes
- Flower former
- Craft scissors
- Liquid Food Coloring
- Food-grade glycerin to make wafer paper conditioner
- Corn starch
- Flower paper punches
- Steamer to shape wafer paper
