Sean wanted to take smash cake photos with Maya. I naively thought that meant he wanted me to let her smash into her cake on her birthday and have him take photos. Then he started showing me some example images with beautiful backgrounds and adorably clad babies and ridiculously large cakes. Clearly, this would require a little more effort.
Maya’s cake smash – almost 1 year old
To start with, I bought a giant cupcake pan. Then, because so many of the cakes in the photos looked to be professionally done, I bought a decorating kit. Sean bought a purple background and a fluffy orange tutu. I baked a test cake and practiced decorating it. I made a giant pile of icing. I attempted to refrigerate said icing overnight and somehow destroyed it. Sean purchased emergency icing (‘cause I just didn’t feel like making more icing just then.) The long and short is that a LOT of preparation went into this project.
The day finally came for the photos. I had baked the cake earlier in the day and decorated it while Maya napped. Sean set up his background and lighting. I looked at his set-up and told him he needed to be fast on the trigger. If the pudding painting was any indicator, the girl was going to be hauling cake to her mouth as fast as her little arms could manage. He said he wasn’t so sure. Lots of the kids in the online photos were pretty dainty about it. Maya, generally speaking, is not a dainty child. I bet him five dollars that she’d tear into it. Needless to say, I lost my money.
Happy Pre-smash Maya
We got her all tutu-ed up and brought her in for some photos. She happily bounced around and grinned while Sean took a few cake-free shots. Then I brought the cake in. She reached out and touched it right away, and then she paused. She looked around in confusion and crawled around the cake to get to me. We tried it again. Nope, getting away from the cake as quickly as possible.
We thought maybe it was because it was late in the day, so we tried again the next day. Again, no joy. She’d scramble away from that cake and into my arms almost as soon as I sat her down. I gave her tastes of the icing and of the cake, feeling certain that if she just realized it was sweet and delicious, she’d lay into it, and still, she was having none of it. She got so upset at one point, she was full on, tears-streaming-down-her-face crying. Even sitting on my lap near the cake, she was very tentative and kept wanting to crawl away.
Not sure about this …
Finally, Daddy took control of the situation. He plopped her in front of the cake and shoved her hands in it. Even then, she was pretty ambivalent about the situation, seeming to want nothing more than to get that mess off her hands. We did manage to get some cute smash cake photos, they just weren’t the photos we set out to capture. When Maya was born a month early, someone told us it was good practice – that she’d be surprising us every step of the way. That person wasn’t wrong.
