I was first introduced to the idea of a Cake Smash via good ole' Pinterest a few months ago...
I immediately knew I HAD to do one for Tyne's first birthday because come on - cake and babies - what's not to love?!
Tyne is only going to be little enough to put into
I had planned out how I was going to do our Cake Smash to achieve maximum photo cuteness results, with minimal stress and mess for a good few weeks before the day.
I had briefly considered making my own Smash Cake to save a bit of money, but as I was already making the proper Birthday Cake I didn't want the added hassle - so I bought a giant cupcake from Asda which cost £10.00 - it was more than I had hoped to spend, but the £5 ones I had intended to use were much smaller than I thought - I think in order for the photos to look super effective you need the cake to look bigger than the baby! To me, that's part of the charm!
Because we didn't want to waste an entire £10 worth of good chocolate cake, we let him pose with the full cake for the first few photos - knowing he would be a little bemused for the first few minutes - and then whisk the cake away to cut it in half for the rest of the photos - this meant we saved half the cake totally untouched to eat later ourselves, and we still got some great photos of the full cake!
It also meant that Tyne could get to the cake part right away without having to eat through about 7 lbs of Buttercream topping first!
I ordered a little outfit specifically for the smash from Cake Smash Props on Facebook - the tie and nappy cover set cost £17 including postage, and I was really pleased with it.
I love the baby blue and the teddy bear print which matches his whole Teddy Bears Picnic party theme so perfectly.
I also made sure that there were PLENTY of people there with me to help things run smoothly!
I knew that trying to photograph Tyne, keep him from getting chocolate all over the carpet and get him to smile without covering myself and my camera in chocolate mess would be an impossible task - so we had myself in charge of photos, Jon in charge of keeping Tyne in position and my Mum & Dad in charge of making Tyne laugh!
For the background I wanted to keep it simple - I needed something that would double as a nice crisp background to reflect the daylight well, and a covering to keep my carpet clean!
I decided that a double white flat sheet was perfect - we draped it over two chair backs and pinned it into place, it was high enough to provide the perfect backdrop but there was still plenty of it for Tyne to sit on.
We didn't get a single crumb on the carpet and it made the whole thing super easy to tidy up after - we just bunched up the sheet, shook it off outside and put it straight into the wash! Perfect!
We also made sure we had some props at hand to try out some different shots - including his '1' birthday balloon, and a super cute pair of Cake shaped head boppers which I found in Home Bargains for 99p!
I experimented with different camera positions during the smash, taking some shots from below which emphasised the size of the cake nicely!
The cake smash was SO much fun ... Tyne certainly had a good go at it and LOVED the experience ... I'm sure he wondered why it had taken us a whole year to come up with such an excellent way of serving dessert!
I am so glad we did a cake smash, and will cherish the adorable photos forever!
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