Designing a Birthday Card from Scratch: Piece of Cake
Step inside the studio and follow the evolution of Piece of Cake through early experiments, unexpected design problems, and the process of turning a simple slice of birthday cake into eight original paper art designs.
Where It All Started
In February 2025, Michael and I founded Wicked Good Cards, a nonprofit that gives people in Maine care communities free access to handmade greeting cards.
That meant I was going to be making a lot more cards. I purchased a Cricut Maker to give us more design options than the Sizzix machine I had been using for years.
With Sizzix, I used metal dies to cut paper into specific shapes. I already had hundreds of them for images, shapes, and messages, but each die could only cut the shape it was designed to make.
The Cricut Maker offered a different kind of flexibility. It uses digital artwork and a computer-controlled blade to cut paper, which meant I could resize images, change individual pieces, and combine elements in ways I couldn't with a fixed die. Suddenly, I had a much bigger playground. One of the first things I wanted to make was cake.
A Birthday Cake Card
As I started thinking about the cards we would need for Wicked Good Cards, birthday cards were high on my list. No matter what circumstances they might be navigating, people still have birthdays.
Before diving into Cricut Design Space to find a design, I started sketching ideas on my reMarkable, working through different ways I might build a cake from paper. I considered a single slice of cake, with lots of different, colorful papers for the layers and a candle on top.
At this point, I wasn't creating my own digital artwork, so I needed to find something in the app that I could adapt to my idea. I found a simple layered slice of cake with a cute little rose on top. It didn't have the candle I had imagined, but it was close. The separate pieces would let me choose different papers for each layer and assemble them into a dimensional cake.
The First Slice
For the first version, I was still following my plan to use the Cricut for artwork and rely on my Sizzix dies for lettering, so I pulled out a Happy Birthday die I already owned and cut the message from purple glitter paper.
For the cake, I started playing with color. I chose pink frosting and used four different papers for the layers: lavender glitter, yellow, bright pink glitter, and red. The Cricut cut each part separately, and I assembled the pieces to create my first dimensional slice of cake.
I loved the result, but the pink frosting, purple glitter lettering, and colorful layers made the card feel decidedly feminine. Since I was creating birthday cards for people I didn't know, I wanted a counterpart that felt more masculine while keeping the same basic design.
Another Slice
I went back to my paper collection and started changing the colors. I replaced the pink frosting with dark blue and chose shades of brown, cream, and copper for the layers of cake. I also traded the purple glitter Happy Birthday for dark blue lettering to coordinate with the frosting.
When I put the two cards side by side, I started noticing things I hadn't considered when I made the first one.
The card base. This was the most glaring discovery. The first cake was built on a warm ivory cardstock, and the second on bright white. The card bases weren't even the same size. I was still learning about paper and hadn't yet standardized the cardstock, color, or dimensions I used for my card bases. Seeing the two together made me realize how much those choices affected the finished card.
The cake itself. My spacing was pretty wonky. I was placing the individual elements where they seemed to fit without really thinking about the composition of the card as a whole. And once I started looking at the colors as actual cake ingredients, neither version made much sense. The pink cake had lavender glitter, yellow, bright pink glitter, and red layers. They were cute together, but what exactly was that cake supposed to be? The blue version had dark blue frosting over layers of brown, cream, and copper. I had been choosing papers because the colors worked together, not because they looked like something someone might actually eat.
The lettering. The Sizzix Happy Birthday die had seemed perfectly fine when I made the first card, but now the letters looked almost like they were melting into one another. Not the look I was going for. I decided it was time to figure out how to create and cut the lettering with the Cricut, too.
A Better Birthday Wish
For the next version, I had a few things I wanted to fix. The lettering needed to be cleaner. The cake needed better spacing. And after looking at those first two color combinations, I wanted the layers to look like they could actually belong in a real piece of cake.
I started with the message. I created a new Happy Birthday design and cut it from gold glitter paper using the Cricut. The new lettering was cleaner and gave me much more control over its size and placement on the card.
Then I reconsidered the entire cake palette. Instead of choosing colors because they looked good together, I decided what each layer was supposed to represent. The dark brown outer layer became chocolate fondant, with cappuccino, vanilla, mocha, and chocolate making up the layers inside.
For the first time, I wasn't just assembling a colorful cake. I was thinking about how an actual piece of cake was constructed and using the paper to represent it.
More Cake!
Once I had a cake and lettering I liked, I wanted to see how far I could take the idea. I started building new slices around different flavors, changing the frosting, cake layers, lettering, and decorations to create a distinct palette for each one.
Before long, I had an entire paper bakery spread across the table.
It was perfect! We had one birthday cake design that could become eight completely different cards. Someone who loved pink could get Raspberry Reverie. Someone who preferred darker colors could get Chocolate Decadence or Blueberry Bliss. The different flavors gave us options for different tastes and personalities without having to create an entirely different birthday card each time.
Together, they looked like a collection. I even named each slice: Blackberry Dream, Blueberry Bliss, Chocolate Decadence, Key Lime Delight, Lemon Burst, Orange Jubilee, Raspberry Reverie, and Red Velvet Royale.
As far as I was concerned, the birthday card was finished.
An Unexpected Change in Policy
In September 2025, Cricut changed its Angel Policy, which governs how Cricut artwork can be used in finished products. We had been considering using card sales to raise funds for Wicked Good Cards, and the new policy placed restrictions on how certain artwork available through Cricut Design Space could be used commercially. It also excluded Licensed Digital Content from the Angel Policy, raising questions for me about using that artwork for cards created and donated through our nonprofit.
Basically, if I wanted complete freedom to sell or donate the cards we created, I needed to use my own artwork. My eight perfectly lovely birthday cakes were no longer finished
designs; they were prototypes.
Fine.
I had no idea how to turn my sketches into digital designs for paper art, but I wasn't about to let that stop me.
Learning to Design with Paper
So, yeah. I had a lot to learn.
Over the next seven months, I taught myself how to turn my ideas into digital artwork that could actually be built from paper. That meant learning how to create and modify shapes, break an image into individual pieces, and think through how those pieces would fit together once they were cut.
At the same time, I was figuring out the physical side of the process: which papers worked for different details, how they behaved on the cutting mats, and how blade pressure and other machine settings affected the cut.
I practiced on other designs first. With each one, I learned a little more about how something I created on a screen would translate into individual pieces of paper I could cut, layer, and assemble by hand.
In April 2026, I was ready to make my own birthday cake.
Designing My Own Cake
I started by rebuilding the cake itself. The original artwork had been designed almost like a flat diagram of a slice, with the layers stacked beneath a single piece of frosting that wrapped around the right side.
Once I decided to put the cake on a plate, I needed the slice to feel more complete, so I created a buttercream frosting layer on the bottom to give the cake more structure and make it look like something that could actually sit on the plate.
I also changed what was happening on top of the cake slice. The original cake had a red rose and greenery, but for the new design I wanted a birthday candle and a little dollop of whipped cream. I added a pale pink "tablecloth" beneath the plate to ground the entire scene.
I liked where the design was headed, especially the new shape of the cake, but the scene around it wasn't doing much to support it. The pale pink tablecloth felt flat, the white plate nearly disappeared against the card base, and there wasn't enough contrast to make the cake stand out, so I started experimenting with other surfaces.
Setting the Scene
I replaced the pale pink tablecloth with a wood surface and continued adding dimension to the smaller details. I rebuilt the candle from multiple layers of paper and added a thin gold detail around the plate. The darker surface gave the cake more contrast and helped ground the scene, so I worked through several versions, changing the cake layers, frosting dollop, lettering color, and other details to see what worked best together.
The wood gave the cake the contrast I was looking for, but the color combinations still needed work. The chocolate whipped cream looked a little too much like poop. And the blue Happy Birthday lettering didn't connect visually to anything else in the design. Changing the lettering to brown swung too far in the other direction. Between the chocolate cake, brown frosting, brown lettering, and wood surface, there was simply too much brown competing for attention.
More importantly, the wood itself was creating a practical problem. Building the surface from additional layers of paper made an already dimensional card noticeably heavier and thicker than it needed to be. I liked what the wood did visually, but I didn't like what it did to the card.
Served Up on a Silver Platter
Once I removed the wood, I returned to the plate and started experimenting with ways to give it more presence against the white card base. I started with a single plate, but it disappeared too easily into the white cardstock.
Next, I added a layer of silver glitter paper to give the plate a defined edge, almost like a charger. I liked the effect, and seeing the silver underneath gave me another idea. If I was going to serve up a piece of cake, why not serve it on a silver platter?
For the next version, I enlarged the silver layer to create a proper platter with more room around the cake. The larger size improved the proportions, gave the cake more breathing room, and added just enough sparkle without bringing back the weight and bulk of the wood.
At this point, the cake and candle were finally where I wanted them. The new artwork was mine, the silver platter gave the slice a finished setting, and I had removed the extra weight and bulk created by the wood. There was just one detail I still wanted to change: the blue lettering. It didn't connect to anything else in the design, and after everything I had done to refine the card, it felt out of place.
The solution was already sitting in front of me: color. Instead of using the same lettering color across every card, I matched the Happy Birthday lettering to the glitter paper used for the middle layer of each cake. That connected the message directly to the slice and gave every flavor its own color palette.
By this point, I was also thinking very differently about how I designed with paper. I wasn't simply choosing colors that looked good together. I started thinking about how an actual piece of cake is constructed. Where would the cake layers be? Where would the filling go? How would frosting or fondant work within the slice? Every piece of paper needed a reason to be there.
That thinking carried into the smallest details. To create the candle, I studied an actual candle flame, noting the different colors within it and recreating them as individual layers of paper to give the flame dimension. From the shape of the cake and the frosting spread between its layers to the little dollop of whipped cream on top, I thought about how each element could be translated into paper. The size of the platter, the spacing, and even the relationship between the glitter layer in the cake and the lettering became deliberate design decisions.
With those final changes, I rebuilt the entire collection.
Want to see how each flavor changed? Scroll through the gallery below to see the original and redesigned versions side by side.
Just One More Piece
After all of that designing, experimenting, and rebuilding, I wanted to go back to the card that started it all. I put the very first pink birthday cake beside Raspberry Reverie, its final version, to see where that original idea ended up.
The two cards share the same basic idea: a colorful slice of birthday cake built from layers of paper. Everything I learned along the way is in the difference between them.
Who Wants Cake?
Today, the Piece of Cake greeting card is available in eight paper flavors, each handcrafted in our Southern Maine studio. Pick your favorite slice and send someone a little cake for their birthday.
Mainely Yours, Shannon
