On the weekend, we did a Smash Cake session for Roman’s 1st Birthday. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a Smash Cake is a cake made just for the baby. They get to squash it, poke it, eat it and play with it…all in the name of fun! The idea is to take a heap of photos and I think it’s a great way of capturing a baby’s 1st Birthday.

The day before we planned to do it, I made up the cake. I made a Sugar-free Carrot and Date cake, which was delicious. You can find all the details on the cake here.

In the morning, we checked it wasn’t too cold, and after Roman had finished his breakfast and had a little play, we got to it.

Hubby did all the setup in the garage, while I decorated the cake. For our setup, we took the car out of the garage and gave it a quick sweep. Then we rolled out some lino that we had. I liked the look of the brick wall in the background, so we left it as is. This also meant we didn’t need to bother trying to find a nice white background. The morning sun streams into our garage, so we put the garage door about halfway down and then sticky-taped a sheet up to block any sun coming directly onto the lino. To even out the light, we used a flash in a soft box. This connects to the camera with a super long cord, although there are wireless ones out there.

We had lots of fun and I’m so pleased with the results. The only problem, is trying to pick just one photo to get blown up.

Here you can see our setup, although we also had a sheet sticky-tapes to the bottom of the garage door, because there was a little too much light coming in. This is a pretty basic setup, but I’m so happy with the results.