Saturday, February 27, 2010

Party People in the house say "hey"

"When kids hit one year old, it's like hanging out with a miniature drunk person." - J. Depp

My daughter is turning four in just a few hours. I've broken away from the weekend-long festivities to blog about....the cake...of course.

A week before, I had asked her what kind of birthday cake she wanted - and she immediately started spouting off names of her favorite cartoon characters, nearly hyperventilating herself. The crucial elements included:

Ni-Hao Kai Lan
Dora the Explorer
Hello Kitty
The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse characters

We also browsed through Google images for some source material that was acceptable to her. Once I had a rough idea of what to construct, I started Photoshopping a montage. This was going to be a photo-cake, so I had to plan accordingly.

For extra-credit, I found a rounded font similar to the Ni-Hao Kai Lan logo, color-matched the text and utilized some of the decorative inserts and elements. With photo-cakes, it's best to put the text in yourself, rather than risk having the baker write something in icing.

Here's the end result:





3 comments:

Stac said...

That looks so cool-- she must have been so excited!

I ge the photoshopery, but how did you actually get it onto the cake? Did you have the baker do that?

Alex said...

Yes. Bakers have "icing sheets" made of edible starch that they can feed through an inkjet printer (loaded with edible dyes). The printer prints onto the sheet and it's then applied to an already-frosted cake.

After just a few seconds at room temperature, the starch "melts" into the frosting.

Anonymous said...

OMG that is so awesome! And happy birthday to Miss meg she is so flippin' beautiful!