Mmm… Coffee Cake

May has turned out to be such a productive month so far that I completely failed to blog about one of my projects! Way back at the start of the month was my Mum’s birthday. Which of course called for Coffee Cake (with capitals, given the amount of coffee I use!). My Mum likes her cake to REALLY taste of coffee, so I often triple the recommended amount, which has got even easier since discovering instant espresso powder, rather than trying to use ordinary instant coffee and failing to get it to dissolve properly in such tiny amounts of water.

The perceptive among you may notice that this is actually Robert’s belated birthday cake, but Mum’s (
apparently unphotographed) cake looked just like this, except for the sunshine.

However, cake on its own isn’t really a present (not when you’re known for making cake for much flimsier reasons than a birthday). So I ventured into screen printing, and converted a remnant of table cloth into a set of eight napkins (we’re a big family).

I used the “contact vinyl” technique described by Lil Blue Boo (as far as I can tell “sticky back plastic” in the UK) and an old screen I had in a card making kit and off I went…

A bit fiddly, and not all came out perfectly, but was much easier than hand stencilling the same design 8 times, and it all went down very nicely with Mum.

Especially the cake.