Birthday on the Cheap

Brian’s birthday was yesterday, and we had a little party with some friends. Brian’s a pretty shy guy and doesn’t like much of a fuss made over his birthday, but one thing we always do (party or not) is make and decorate a cake. Last year we did a cake modeled after the second Apple logo, introduced in 1976 (my husband is just a little bit of a Mac geek…. if a little bit of = complete):

This year Brian asked me to make a cake that looks like the Mac OS cursor:

Of course, if you are a designer you’re probably aware that if you zoom in on an image like the cursor above, it’d look something like this:

Only not made out of cake. But wouldn’t that be nice?

Anyway, there’s Brian’s cake for this year. I made it more difficult on myself than it needed to be, because I felt like I needed to carve out all of the notches, not thinking about the fact that the white icing would mask all of that detail. Here’s the cake uniced:

I decided that I can say I was just trying to keep the integrity of the piece intact. Sound convincing? Didn’t think so. :) Oh well! We were happy with how the cake turned out, and it probably cost about $10 for all of the supplies I needed for both the cake and icing (I had some things already on hand). I’m sure we would have spent at least twice that to get a cake at the bakery, and I don’t know that we’d have been able to get the design we wanted. Plus, it’s fun doing it ourselves!

We didn’t do much in the way of decor for the party, but I did want to have something indicating this was a celebration. I thought about buying a banner to put up, but then thought of a more unique & creative option. J, like I mentioned in a previous post, is really loving his watercolors right now. I had him do some paintings, and then I cut letters out of them to spell out Happy Birthday. I pinned up some ribbon I already had, and taped the letters to it. I think it turned out pretty great – and it didn’t cost us a cent, since we just used things we already had around the house.