One of my clients is DecoPac, Inc., a company that specializes in novelty birthday cakes. Most of my work for them involves licensed characters from Disney, DreamWorks, Cartoon Network, etc. but every once in a while they hire me to work up an original cake concept. In this case they wanted to create a jumbo “Happy Birthday” cake design. This would be a “signature” cake, meaning it would be much larger and taller than a typical birthday cake.

The challenge was to create something fun and festive that hadn’t been done a hundred times before. I started by brainstorming a few possible novelty toys or doo-dad’s that could go on top of the cake. Something small and fun, but hopefully not too cliche. These were my first rough ideas:

I also played around with a few ideas for a theme on the actual cake itself.:

The liked the 4th and 6th cake ideas, so I combined them into this concept:

From their DecoPac took this rough idea and worked with their manufacturers to develop the final product. As often happens, more changes were made as the idea continued to evolve in-house. Here’s how the final cakes turned out:

You can also view the final product on the DecoPac website.