I love getting to make birthday cakes, especially when it’s for one of my friends, and extra especially when the birthday party is a surprise but the birthday girl informs me herself that she wants a cake from me! Lol!

My sweet friend Kim is amazing.  She is the wonderful, supportive wife of the senior pastor of our church home in Niceville, FL.  She’s an incredibly talented musician and self proclaimed doo-wop girl 🙂  So I was thrilled to get to the opportunity to not only make her cake but also to design it.  The only instructions she gave me were to make it chocolate and have something musical on it.

I love getting to design a cake for someone, because it’s an opportunity for me to create a one-of-a-kind cake just for them.  But when I’m given complete artistic liberty, I get a little anxious.  I mean what if I pick a beautiful color palette and then find out that the person hates that color!  I like to have some kind of guidelines or inspiration to use as a springboard!  Thank goodness for Kim’s daughter Kristen for picking out a fun and funky invitation that was the perfect guide for my cake!  The invite had these great neon colored kaleidoscope-like star bursts on a black background that I just had to incorporate into my design.  So after a few tweaks here and there I came up with a sketch that I thought was perfect.

Sketch of the 50th birthday cake.

So now that I had a plan, I made a delicious triple chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream frosting and marshmallow fondant.  On the day of the party, the birthday girl said that it was the perfect cake and she said that it just screamed “Kim”! And that was the best compliment she could have given me 🙂

Kim's 50th birthday cake in black and neon! Feeds 50-60. MSRP $180.

Close up of Kaleidoscope pattern 🙂