Instead, we had a DIY b-day celebration. I picked up some Duff's Tie-Dye Cake Mix from Target and crossed my fingers that little Miss Moody, er, wow, did I say that outloud?? Yikes. I crossed my fingers that little Miss Molly would find the idea of making her own cake acceptable. Luckily, she did. Plus, her sister Maggie hung around to help (thank goodness...I was in my very helpless days back then). But Maggie's presence always helps Molly's mood. (I feel like that's one m-word away from being a killer tongue-twister)
They set to work in the kitchen, I curled up on the sofa with an ice pack and Kerig took over photographer duties. God bless him, because if there's food being made, he's there to document the shit out of that occasion!
The cake prep involved no less than 12 small bowls for tinted cake mix, 200 hand strokes of the batter, and 13 readings of the directions. I was bracing for a hot mess and had to remind myself that even brown Easter eggs make tasty egg salad. And let's face it: chocolate cake is brown, and no one has a beef with that, right?
Guess who was wrong?
The cake actually turned out very cool looking! There was probably 4 times as much frosting on there than I would have preferred, but it was apparently necessary for the overall design aesthetic. Or something like that.
I wanted the layout to convey the same joyful exuberance that the cake did - lots of colors and sprinkles everywhere. Had I thought about it at the time, actual sugar might have been used.
I used tons of Bella Blvd papers from their Scattered Sprinkles, Summer Squeeze and Classic Calendars line. The font for "rainbow" is called Blackout and I've gotten a lot of use out of it. (See: here & here) The font comes the way you see here - with the blocks already cut out around the letters. I've used the letters themselves as well as the negative space frame, like here. I love it. I used my old standby SNF Lollihop for the word taste. Truth be told, I don't love it here. The word taste should be - well, I don't want to say smaller...I think I want to say "less bold". It's just so visually large, but honestly, I did the title towards the end and I was just plain and simple running out of steam at that point. I did cut it out with a rainbow of cardstock colors for underneath, but you had to be viewing at just the right angle and have perfect close up vision to see it. Lord knows, that detail is lost to me, but my daughter swears she can see it. Either way, the word is too big, but I give myself a sold B for the effort.
I also used a very old Heidi Swapp mask and some new(ish) Heidi Swapp color shine sprays to break up the starkness of the plain white background. I was on the fence about how it came out, but on the finish page, the actual design gets lost (probably a good thing) and you're just left with some blobs of color...and that's okay.
This layout has EIGHT photos on it. Holy cow. That's a lot. And I haven't done a two page spread in years and years. it was weird, trying to remember how to work all of this. But I like so many of the photos and I had a hard enough time working it down to just these few, so I'm really glad I came up with a way to squeeze them all on.
Thanks for stopping by!
Awesome cake - and you did a great job capturing the joy of making the cake. Bella Blvd papers were the perfect choice.
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