Thursday, October 25, 2012

A Little Creativity and Some Lessons Learned.

Beer and cake and notes scrawled on napkins. Who's best ideas HAVEN'T come to them right before last call??! If you recently picked up a copy of Coupe Magazine, you may have noticed a big ol' cake covered with words of wisdom. Well my friends, I'm proud to say that that cake was the product of another super-fun collaboration between myself and the uber-talented Dana Harrison. We decided to take up some ad space in this year's annual and use it as a promo-piece designed to congratulate all of this year's winners.


Here's a little peak into where our inspiration came from and a couple lessons we learned along the way:


After we fuelled up on Sweet Tea and Brisket Sandwiches, we ate A LOT of fortune cookies, all in the name of inspiring our copy of course.


We realized that in order to pipe our copy onto the cake (YES, Dana did that by hand!), we would have to create some kind of template.  Here comes lesson #1 - It's never a good idea to use cinnamon to create a guide for text on a white cake. That results in a whole lot of retouching.


How could this icing colour not inspire something awesome?!


Here comes lesson # 2: No matter how well Dana's dog is behaving while there is food on set, he is always, always waiting for his moment to pounce. We stupidly let our guard down for all of thirty seconds, and very nearly lost hours of work to a sneaky dog. Through some stroke of luck, he was feeling particularly generous and only ate the discard plate I was using to style the cake with. OY! Lesson learned.

As always, Dana and I had a blast. Who knows, maybe someday we'll open an online store where we sell snarky yet inspirational cakes. Someday.....