Harley Davidson 50th birthday cake

Long story....

A customer called, wanting to know if she emailed us a couple photos if we could put them on a cake and have it ready for her by 2:30 the next day. We said sure, thinking it’d be easy to print two edible photos and put them on a half sheet cake.

Boy were we wrong.

The email we received contained the two photos, one with her father and brother, another with just the bike. She was requesting that we take the photo of her father and change the bike photo to have him riding it AND with an oxygen tank tucked beneath his arm and the tubes in his nose. Or draw it if we could, whatever.

I about cried.

I called her back and kindly explained how our photo system worked; we copy a photo onto edible paper, cut it out, and place it on the cake. No editing other than a resize button. She still didn’t quite understand, and was somewhat upset that we said we could have the order ready, but now we were saying we might not be able to do it at all. I said I would do what I could and email her in the morning what her options were.
I got home and started working on Photoshopping the photos, finding free stock photos of an oxygen supplementation system also, and putting them all together. I cropped the backgrounds, merged the two main photos, and added the stock photos (including erasing all but the tubes from a face shot of the oxygen system, and drawing connecting tubes by hand). I saved the composite, and printed THAT on the cake.
My Photoshop skills are limited, but for a cake? It worked. The customer was very happy with her order, and couldn’t believe we managed to get almost everything she wanted. (She didn’t care he wasn’t on the bike, since it was “obviously parked anyway.”) I know the photo isn’t centered, and I know there’s a seam down the middle of the edible image, but it turned out pretty nice.