DIY Cake Smash

I'm a little behind in posting but last weekend was Kayleigh's birthday party! The weekend prior my friend and I started the day with garage sales then finished with a cake smash for Kayleigh! If you google cake smashes it seems like it can be very difficult and overwhelming to get those perfect shots but it actually isn't that hard! For the location I temporally rearranged the living room so we could set up on a wall that gets great natural light. Then I used blue painter's tape to tape up a plain white twin size sheet.

 

The candy decorations were actually the genius idea of my friend. She picked up some styrofoam balls, small cake boards and tissue paper. We just wrapped the styrofoam balls and cake boards in the tissue paper and Viola! Instant candy!

 

For the cake we just used a small 8 inch cake pan, cream cheese icing and blue and yellow sprinkles (they looked green when mixed). I actually wanted rainbow sprinkles but last minute I realized I completely forgot to buy some so we made due with what we had.

Here is a side by side comparison to show what my straight-out-of-the-camera photos looked like. This is one of the reasons I love shooting in RAW. I just opened it up in Lightroom and edited the exposure and sharpness a bit, then used Photoshop to get lighten the wrinkles in the sheet. I also used the Coffee Shop action, Lustrous Pop, to brighten the colors a bit.

Kayleigh wasn't much into eating the cake. When we first set her down, she was all like "Uh... you are letting me make a mess... Are you sure? I'm not going to get in trouble?"

We eventually had to help her along and soon she was squishing cake between her hands. 

Little chubby baby hands covered in cake. Is there anything more precious? 

All the preparation and set up and we were all done in less than 15 minutes. Kay had a ton of fun, even if she didn't care to eat the cake.