A [cake]full weekend

I really wanted to do a quick trial run of Traci's cake that's coming up in two weeks.  I posted the inspiration cake last week, and I just wanted to make sure that method would create the look I wanted.  

And Brad wanted to eat the cake.

So, I guess we each had our missions.

We also decided kind of spur of the moment to paint/stain our deck.  We have talked about it several times, but for some reason we ended up at Home Depot Saturday and bought stain.  

(I will talk more about that next week when we finish, but you can see it in the background of some of the pics and get a hint of what we did.  The railing and such is white, the main boards will be a dark brown.)

I didn't take the time to make the under layer dark red like she wants, so this one was slightly pinkish.   And I think that it will be much more impressive in the three layer form, rather than this single.  I'm actually considering doing a 4 tier for them, giving them a small 4" cake for their anniversary, even though we only discussed a 3 tier.

 I mean, I'm already doing three, what's another tiny cake?  And it could be really cute to cut out their monogram and the little birds.  We'll see if I have time!

Their theme is 'love birds,' which seems to be a lot of people's themes lately.  OK, fine, I know one other person.  It feels like 'everybody.'

So here is a close up of the birds from their invitation. 

 I can't decide if the border will be ribbon (as shown-actually, better than shown,  I ripped that one off the invitation! That's why it's a little crinkly...) or if I want to pipe a pearl border in that color.  

I had fun, and Brad?  Well, he got his cake!