Cake Toppers with a Built-In Sparkler HolderThe personalised topper that makes the cake sparkle

It is the part that has always been missing from the sparkler-on-a-cake moment. Ice fountains are sold loose, so most people wedge one into the icing, jam it into a plastic tube pushed through the sponge, or hold it by hand. Our toppers replace all of that with a printed collar in the base of the design that takes the fountain's own tube and keeps it vertical.

The rest of the topper is the decoration — a unicorn, a dragon, a golfer, Mr & Mrs, a name and an age. It does the job a card topper does, and then it does the job a sparkler holder does. When the fountain has burnt out you lift the whole thing off in one piece and the cake gets cut clean.

• Yes: standard upright cake fountains, sold as ice fountains, cake fountains or fountain candles — the stubby ones with a rigid tube base that stand on their own.
• No: thin handheld wire sparklers. Wrong shape for the socket, wrong behaviour over a cake, and never what these toppers were designed for.
• No: numeral sparklers, sparkler letters and anything mounted on a wire frame.

Ice fountains sit in the birthday-candle aisle of most supermarkets and in every party shop, usually a couple of euros for a pack. Buy them separately, check the packet says indoor use, and check the tube is the ordinary rigid sort rather than a novelty shape.

• Push the fountain all the way down into the socket so it cannot tip.
• Light it in clear air: no low ceilings, no bunting, balloons or paper lanterns overhead, no curtains within reach.
• An adult lights it and everyone else stays back. Never carry the cake while it is lit.
• Let it burn out completely, then wait a moment — the spent tube is hot — before lifting the topper off.
• Follow the instructions on the fountain's own packaging. That is the item with the safety rating; the topper is only the stand.

The topper is not edible and is not food safe. It rests on the icing and comes off before anyone cuts. If the buttercream is soft, sit the base on a small disc of baking paper so it lifts away cleanly.

Indoor fireworks are classified goods with their own storage, packaging and carriage rules, and posting them across the EU is a completely different business from posting a printed decoration. This is one person with 3D printers, so we make the part nobody else makes and leave the pyrotechnics to shops licensed for it. It also keeps your delivery simple: a topper is just a parcel.

You can use every design here with no fountain at all, and plenty of people do — especially for children's parties and for venues with a no-naked-flame rule. Unlit, it is still a solid, personalised, three-dimensional object that outlasts the cake by about a decade.