First Anniversary Cake

Traditionally, you save the top tier of your cake on your wedding day and eat it on your first anniversary.  Where, we do intend to also do that, I thought, why not make something fresh as well?!  So I decided to make a personalized anniversary cake that not only tastes fresh and delicious, but also has significance.

Getting a gift for someone can be super difficult to do.  Especially when you have been with someone for so long.  You don’t want to constantly get them the same gift year after year, but how on Earth are you supposed to come up with new ideas?? Apparently, it has always been this way!

In 1920, an American author named Emily Post decided she wanted to solve the age-old mystery of what to give your significant other for each wedding anniversary.  She decided to make a definitive list of themes for anniversary gifts, but only chose to submit ideas for every 5 years (i.e. 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th, etc.).  People started following her list of suggestions and along the way others submitted new ideas of what to get each year (i.e. 1st, 2nd, 3rd…).  Eventually, there was a universal list created of anniversary gifts by year.

Obviously, you do not have to stick to this list of ideas when purchasing a wedding anniversary gift.  But I thought it would be a lot of fun to stick with the traditional gift ideas and make my cake according to theme! (and I intend to keep doing this for every anniversary.)

With September 23rd being our first anniversary, the traditional gift theme is PAPER and the traditional color is GOLD/YELLOW.

Theme – Paper

I knew that I wanted to make a cake topper out of paper to stay with the “traditional anniversary gift” theme.  I had a lot of ideas running around in my head, but eventually came up with the idea of personalized paper portraits!  I sketched out the outline of our faces, and kept the design very minimalist so that you could still see the white of the paper.

Picking pictures for the toppers proved to be a bit more difficult than I anticipated.  I didn’t realize how few pictures I have of myself that are straight on!  So I had to go back a couple years to find a picture where you can see at least most of my face.

Last minute I decided to also sketch out a #1, to make it even more obvious it is our first anniversary!

Color – Gold/Yellow

The color was the easy part!! Obviously with the themed color being gold, I had to have gold sprinkles!  I found these super metallic sprinkles and fell in love!  I tried to make the sprinkles fade from the bottom up to give an ombre effect, but (note to self) tiny sprinkles are super difficult to make this happen.  So, sorry about the sloppy execution! Oh, well!  Each moment is a teachable moment, right?

I brought in more of the gold/yellow inspiration on the inside of the cake!  I chose to make a lemon-flavored cake because, 1. It’s yellow and 2. It’s delicious!  Keeping with the idea of the ombre sprinkles, I decided to make the cake layers ombre as well!  The top layer is the natural color of the cake mix and then I added a bit of yellow and orange dye to the other two layers to make it fade.

I had so much fun making this cake!  And now I want to make custom toppers for every cake I make!!  So keep your eyes peeled for some things in the future 😉

But most importantly, I am so excited to celebrate our first anniversary as man and wife! (still can’t believe it!)

Photography by Auburn Artisan