Back to School cookies mark the beginning of the busier season for cookie bakers and I’ve been working to create new custom cookie cutters to 3D print at home. Year in and out, no matter what the trends, backpack cookies are always a popular option!
Back to School cookies mark the beginning of the busier season for cookie bakers and I’ve been working to create new custom cookie cutters to 3D print at home. So far I’ve used Cookie Design Lab and Canva to design a custom plaque with an apple cutter and an apple with a coquette bow cutter. Still, year in and out, no matter what the trends, backpack cookies are always a popular option. They can be decorated in so many ways, with different designs and themes to be on trend (Labubu anyone?), and even personalized with kids' names. From flooding in different colors, to using an airbrush to add designs, or an Eddie to print complex patterns or characters, no matter what tools you have, you can make adorable backpack cookies. Since it's such a school staple, I figured I have to make a custom backpack cookie cutter using Cookie Design Lab!
To get started, I chose the Instagram post template and then went to Canva elements and searched for backpacks. I then scrolled through the results in Canva images. There were lots to choose from, but I decided to go with a standard, versatile shape with a wide top handle that would be nice and sturdy as a cookie. Then I just saved, downloaded, and moved over to Cookie Design Lab.
Once I dropped the image into Cookie Design Lab, the cutter was practically ready to go! I increased the points to smooth out the cookie cutter edges. Then I went over to sizing. In Cookie Design Lab, you can choose to set the size by height, width, or the diagonal. I usually set it to width, and the 3D rendering shows me that makes this backpack cookie cutter 3.6 inches tall. That’s a nice size for a single cookie and will give me plenty of space if I want to personalize the cookie with a name. Since Cookie Design has a library, I can also easily duplicate this cutter and the other settings I’ve changed, and then resize the cutter.
After sizing the cutter, I clicked the box to add the cutter name. The cutter name is pulled directly from the cutter name field, which is auto-populated with the name of your file, but it can all be changed. Cookie Design Lab automatically finds the straightest edge of your cutter and places the name there. You can also adjust the size of the name on the cutter, so if at the default size it’s wrapping around the cookie and you don’t want it to, just use the slider to lower the size.
The final settings I change on every cutter are the handle and blade settings. For the handle, I increase the size from the default of 0.25 to 0.37, because I like a thicker handle. I also click the box for rounded handles, because it’s more comfortable in my hand when cutting cookies as opposed to a straight edge. Then in blade settings, the only one I change is transition. I like to take this down to 0.125 for the sharpest cutting edge, like what I get from shops I’ve bought cookie cutters from. You can see all this in the red, white, and blue diagram in the upper right corner.
From there, all that was left to do was to save the cutter to my library and get the STL file. Now I’m all ready to print this custom cutter on my Prusa and go make some cookies! Still looking for back to school cookie inspiration? Check out my other posts and how to videos for the additional custom cookie cutters I designed and will be 3D printing at home this fall!
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