It's Genetic

My baby brother turned 12 this weekend.  Happy Birthday, M!!  I missed his party because Baby Bear was sick, but I got to chat with Mom while she worked on his cake.  First, let me just say that my mom is an amazingly talented woman and I like to think that I've inherited a little of her talent, but I really can't compete.

Mom loves  mosaics, so she decided to create a mosaic cake for M, using different colored M&M candies.  She bought a huge bag of them at Sam's and spent some time - okay, a lot of time - seperating out the colors.  After baking the cake, she covered it with plain white frosting, and then spelled out his name and Happy Birthday, using one color of candy for each word. 

Once she had the words arranged how she wanted them, she filled in the space around the letters with M&Ms in a contrasting color.  She started out with yellow as the background for the entire cake, but realized that the orange word "birthday" didn't stand out against the yellow background.  It ended up looking a bit like one of those color blindness tests where you have to try to see the number written in red on a background of green.

Fortunately, she noticed it before she had gotten too far and was able to remove the yellow candies from around the word "birthday" and replace them with brown ones.  She wasn't happy with the letters, because up close it was still a little difficult to make out the words.  To fix this, she halved blue, red, and orange M&Ms, then used them to fill in the gaps and make the letters look more like solid lines.

As a finishing touch, the edges of the cake are covered with various colors of M&Ms, in no particular pattern.  The finished product was really cute, I think.  I believe there are two pieces waiting for Baby Bear and I in Mom's fridge, too - Thanks, Mom!

If I'm going to brag on my mom a little, why stop there?  I'll take some pics of her inedible mosaic creations and post them sometime this week.