The Cricut is a personalized die-cutting machine created by Provo Craft that is used by people who scrapbook and do craft designs to create shapes, art work and other various patterns. The Cricut Cake helps people who bake desserts to decorate cakes, cookies and cupcakes without having to use a professional designer.
People who scrapbook, whether for a living or as a hobby, love adding designs to their pages which include words, pictures, art and other embellishments which add flair to the pages they create. Instead of purchasing individual fonts or shapes that can only be used once, Cricut users instead purchase cartridges which contain hundreds of shapes and font ideas. The cartridge is inserted into the Cricut machine and the user can choose the shape, size, and amount of images they want to cut out. A sheet of paper, card stock or vellum is placed on a 12X12 repositionable glue mat and the Cricut cuts out the shapes chosen on its own.
Similar to the Cricut is the Cricut Cake. The Cricut Cake however is used by desert makers who want to cut out decorations and place them on their desserts. The Cricut Cake also takes cartridges which contain many different designs, however instead of paper, food based materials such as gum paste or frosting sheets are placed on the mat. Being that gum paste and frosting sheets are typically white when purchased both materials can be dyed before they are placed on the mat. The mat is a food grade plastic which also differs from the one used by the Cricut.
Along with the regular Cricut and Cricut Cake there is also the Cricut Expression, Cricut Gypsy and the newly released Cricut Imagine. Each machine differs in size as well as functionality but they all serve the purpose of being used for die-cutting.