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).

Why Did I Start Grinding my Own Wheat?

"Why?", I ask myself , would any sane woman grind her own wheat and make her own bread? Why would she MAKE WORK for herself? Those were my thoughts as I listened to my crazy zealous friends tell me that they baked all of their own bread.


A couple of years later I was attending a Homeschool Bookfair in my area. By 9:30am I had found (and purchased) everything that I needed for my next year's curriculum. I had scheduled a babysitter for the better part of the day and there was NO WAY I was going home this early.


About 9:45am, I bumped into a friend of mine at the Bread Beckers booth and was amazed to find out that this reasonably normal woman made her own bread also. I was thinking again, "What is the DEAL with these women?" As I was talking with my friend, I noticed that a a seminar titled "The Bread of Idleness" was about to start at 10am. Well, my curiousity got the best of me and I decided that I had to go hear what these people were telling everyone to get them to make their own bread. Just to clarify, I went in to the seminar with a very skeptical attitude and felt more like a spy in ememy territory than a student.

Well, believe it or not, I cried about 5 times during the 45 minute seminar on BREAD. Yeah, yeah - very funny. Bread - go figure. I was crying because I realized that I HAD to begin grinding my own wheat. Never mind that I was 8 months pregnant with our fourth child and feeling overwhelmed already. Honestly, I think I was sad because now that I had heard the truth, I was responsible to act on it. After all, about six months before this bookfair I had prayed and asked God to help me to provide healthier meals for my family.


In case you don't have time to click on the links above to learn more, I'll tell you these nuggets that amazed me:

• Of the 44 known essential nutrients needed by our bodies and naturally obtained from foods, only 4 are missing from wheat--vitamin A, B12, and C, and the mineral iodine.


• Within about 72 hours of milling, 90% of over 30 nutrients are virtually gone.


• Refined white flour (like you buy at the grocery store) is missing up to 80% of the nutrients found in the original wheat kernel

Now, 3 years later, I'm still grinding my own wheat and making my own bread. I make five loaves a week. Unlike before, if the kids aren't eating the meal I prepared for them and they ask for another piece of bread, I say YES. Simply because the bread is healthier than whatever else I've cooked. My fourth child, Austin (3 years old), is my healthiest child: No asthma, no allergies, no eczema. I began eating this type of bread during the last month of my pregnancy with him, ate it while I nursed him, and fed it to him as soon as he could eat solids. I don't have any proof that it's the bread, but I personally believe that it is. There are a lot of testimonies on the Bread Beckers website.

If you've read this far, you may want to request a free CD from the Bread Beckers, but be careful! Once you hear the whole seminar, you may be compelled to make YOUR own bread. Then we can all call YOU crazy.