Birthday Cake Bonanza

Guest post from Christy Halsell

Summer at my house means Birthday Season.

3 out of 6 of us celebrate birthdays in June, and another in July. At least 8 other family members have birthdays in June or July as well. Add in end of school, graduation ceremonies, typical summer weddings and 4th of July and we’re party central!

Naturally, when it comes time to write about summer, my mind gravitates towards how we entertain through all of those festivities.  And my favorite part of it all is making the desserts!  (Okay, I really like eating them too, making them might be a close second to the eating part.)  So here are a few of the desserts I’ve made through the years (enjoy!):

Last year I made strawberry and peanut butter cup cupcakes.  Sooo fun and yummy!  I pipe the icing on using a #1 icing tip.  It makes them look really professional (and it’s sooo easy!)

Here’s a fun double layer yellow cake with chocolate sour cream frosting!

And we can’t forget the kid’s party cakes!  This is the train I made for a second birthday.  I really enjoyed making this one!  I used Kit Kats for the train tracks and Oreos with M&Ms for the wheels.  I made a little pond out of blue frosting and stocked it with Goldfish crackers, and the grass is coconut with green food coloring.

When I’m brainstorming cakes, I almost always find myself at Coolest-Birthday-Cakes.com there are usually a host of ideas and I can pick and choose what I’ll do.  I made these train cars in mini loaf pans.  The locomotive is one mini loaf and a second one cut in half.  I also cut out a triangle piece and added it to the front.  Rolos are the light and the bell.  I frosted a marshmallow as the smokestack.

The animal car is peopled with circus animal cookies, and I used pretzels for the bars.  A candy bar is the roof.

The third car is lined with marshmallows and filled with Jelly Bellys.  Yum!

I told you I always end up at Coolest-Birthday-Cakes.com!  I pretty much just copied the ladies over there, I made the whole cake from a 9×13″ sheet pan and cut a triangle for the neck.  I used that triangle for the ear.  Licorice is the bridle and lifesavers are the “connectors”  (I’m not the mom of a real cowboy – I don’t know the names of those things!)   The eye is a Necco wafer with an M&M in the middle of it.  The nostril is also an M&M.  This was a fun cake to make.

This was a particularly fun pirate ship cake.

Try not to notice Party Boy in the background here.  Apparently it was nearly impossible to take pictures without excited small people hovering around.  That’s okay.  It was a birthday.

Pirates were robbed from one son’s Playmobil set and the ship was made from a regular bread loaf pan.  I shaped it a bit before icing it, and added a bit to the back end to make it a bit taller than the rest. I drew lines in the ship to make it look like wood.   Those chocolate-filled wafers make another appearance as the railings of the ship.  I used wooden skewers and cut the sails out of paper.

The desert island was just a second cake baked in a square pan.  I crushed up graham crackers to form the island,  added some palm trees from a dinosaur set, and the treasure chest/shovel from the Playmobil pirate ship set.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do when one son wanted a basketball cake.  I didn’t want to go buy a special cake pan or anything.  So after browsing for ideas, I used a smaller Pyrex bowl to bake the basketball in (1 quart).  I baked the hoop in a square cake pan and trimmed it a little bit on the sides.  After that it was all about icing.  I used gray icing on the hoop, lined it in white to make it look like a net, and did the rim in brown stars.

The basketball is pretty self explanatory, I feel.  I created the lines with brown icing 🙂

These are some of the cakes I’ve made over the years.  There was also a dinosaur at one point, a barn, and a beach scene – not sure where all those pictures went to!

(P.S.  Check out my post at One Fun Mom today for a bonus cake!)

What are your favorite parts of party planning?  Do you have fun cake websites you look to?