Happiness Cake

I drew this piece for April's third theme challenge, "desserts" from the Draw yourself As group on facebook. You can see the other challenges in this folder.
At first, as it was the third and last theme I thought I'd simply do an exercise sketch since I've never drawn food before. As my fiancé and I love cooking, we have a lot of recipe books, so I thought I'd use one as a reference. Then a light bulb just popped above my head and it was screaming "IMAGINE A CUTE RECIPE FULL OF IMAGES AND METAPHORS AND ALL THE GOOD STUFF!". I was still in bed.
So there you go! Happiness cake.

As far as the technique is going I thought I was slaughtering these piece, then I sat down for a second and told myself: "Luala, if your lines are wonky, make them even more wonky". How happy I am now that I did it, I really love the style and might retry this in the future. I'm just sad that my sunshine doesn't look like sparkles but more like snow, or even powdered sugar.
I used two colours for the cake: Carmine and Warm Sepia. Then as I couldn't get enough contrast, I added shadown by mising in Payne's grey. I hope I'm getting better at using my pigments
I wanted this to have a journal look that's why I used a double page on my hand sewn sketchbook, hand writing and sketchy lines.