Birthday Cakes

My friend Terra recently asked me to post pictures of all the birthday cakes that my husband and I have done over the years. She said it would encourage everyone that they can do it too. Well, we've certainly never had any training and we started off with the Wilton Cake Pans that bake or draw the shape right into the cake for you.

We then either grew tired of accumulating ($10-20) cake pans that were only used once or couldn't find a pan for the desired theme and we started branching out. Here are some of them.


It's as simple as coloring between the lines with one of these cake pans. Winnie the Pooh was our first cake ever. We practiced a few stars on a plate and then started in on the cake. Mickey Mouse was our second. We found that the stars looked best if we kept the icing cold. To be honest, the hardest part about these cakes is making and coloring the icing.




Once we discovered disposable icing bags, things got a lot easier. I can't believe how many times we actually took one color icing out of our ONE bag, washed the bag, and then reloaded it with a different color. MISERABLE rookie mistake. And it took more than two cakes for us to figure that out. I have to laugh now. I can't believe we ever made the second cake. The instructions on those Wilton cake pans often go back and forth between colors - Aggh! Oh, what we do for our children!


The Air Craft Carrier cake was fun and easy.


This is the only upright (3D) cake we've ever done. It was so fun to add the licorice track and the puffs of smoke and the candy nose.



This race car cake is my husband's design and he decorated the whole thing! All I did was make and color the icing. The roll bar is licorice and the spoiler is a large Hershey bar. Of course the wheels are chocolate covered donuts.



We used a wok to shape the big basketball and an oven-safe cereal bowl to shape the small one.



The Scooby-Doo cake taught us a good lesson. Icing darkens over time and in the fridge. So when coloring, we now do just a shade lighter than the end result we are looking for.







The "dirt" is just graham-cracker crust (you know with melted butter and sugar mixed in) stuck to recently applied icing. This was one of the easiest cakes we've done. If I ever do anything like this one again though, I will use a darker colored icing underneath. I used a cream color on this one and if I missed a spot with the dirt, bright white seemed to shine through.


I found the idea for this Treasure Chest cake on the internet.

Now, don't worry. We do not go all out like this four times a year (just two times a year). I mean, we have four kids. We've settled into a nice, every other year routine. Each kid gets a store bought cake every other year. What's funny though, is when our kids are reminiscing about their past birthdays, they say things like, "Was that my Batman or my Race Car birthday?" They remember their cakes. So, on the times that we buy store bought cakes, I grieve a little knowing that they will not remember those cakes as clearly. But it sure is nice not to have to make four cakes a year.

We've been known to have the bakery (Kroger or somewhere) scan in a picture from a themed napkin or from a themed plastic tablecloth. I'm big on tablecloths aren't I? Here's an example of a scanned in napkin that Kroger printed on rice paper and put on the cake for us.



Well, happy baking! No deep thoughts here today (well none that I'm ready to blog about).