What with a string of out-of-town visitors and deadlines to distract us,  the Tailor and I let our first anniversary slide by without much fanfare. This week, however, we remembered the nostalgic, circa-early-1980s, licensed-character Wilton cake pans we borrowed from his parents last winter, and decided a belated, totally un-wedding-like anniversary cake was in order. (Sane people just go out for a nice dinner.)

When I was a kid I loved the weird, hairy-looking frosting on those Cookie Monster and Pac Man cakes, but I don’t remember actually having one at any of my birthdays (I usually requested pumpkin pie, still my favorite dessert). So this was my chance to both relive and rewrite my childhood—and to try my hand at creating that bizarre, strangely satisfying frosting texture. The trouble is, ordinary food coloring is squarely on our Do Not Buy list—those dyes are pretty heinous in terms of processed chemicals and unsustainable food practices. A few weeks ago, though, we found some natural dyes made from things like beet juice and tumeric—game on!

The Tailor found a white cake recipe in our favorite cook book (we have three copies!), and we modified an icing recipe to include only butter, sugar, vanilla and cream (about the only thing you’ll ever see me using shortening for is cleaning letterpress equipment). Then I noticed that our Bugs Bunny cake mold left room to write a message in icing—and my eyes strayed to my decorating tip, which was shaped curiously like a calligraphy pen nib. So I couldn’t resist attempting a little edible typography. The cake wasn’t large enough to write “Happy Anniversary” with any typographic flair—and that’s not my style anyway. So I went with something a little more down-to-earth, and, well, appropriate to the medium:

(We did. Most joyfully. My kerning needs some work, though.)