Abby's 7th Birthday!

Abby turned 7 years old at the end of June, and the girl was celebrated many times!  The first of her birthday celebrations was at school before the end of the year--summer birthdays all get clumped together at the end, and Abby came home on a Friday informing me that her teacher said her school birthday would be the coming Monday.  Really?  I searched her backpack for a note alerting me to the plans for her party (should I send cupcakes?  should I plan to attend?  is Abby correct on her dates, or is her celebration a different day??), but found nothing--and as it was a Friday, I couldn't get in touch with her teacher to find out if Abby's intel was correct.  I had already promised my girl some cupcakes for her school party, so that Sunday night, I went ahead and made two dozen to take to her class the following morning--hoping that Abby had her days right!  I was crazy tired that night, and of course, I started my cupcake project very late...so I was finishing up the decorating well after midnight.  I think my tiredness worked in my favor because I got very adventurous with the icing tips--I just pulled tips out at random, and glopped icing on the cupcakes with them!  It was actually pretty fun, although I'm a little bummed because I didn't think to write down which tips I used to make which cupcakes...

my favorites are the dark purple icing

watching DC Cupcakes came in handy a little bit

happy school birthday, Abby!

Phew...I made those cupcakes just a day after Alex's birthday party, so my house was overflowing with cupcakes.  I was a little cupcaked out, but I loved how they looked and was pretty proud of my effort--and Abby was correct on the date for her school party, so I didn't show up in her classroom with cupcakes for no reason!

Abby's next birthday celebration was supposed to be at the playground near our house on her actual birthday--because we were having her big party out at my parents' house (an hour from where we live), I wanted to have a local get-together for her school and neighborhood friends.  I sent out invites in her backpack before school ended, and even though it called for making more cupcakes, I was excited to have a fun outdoor activity with my girl and her friends.

cute invite--and it did include an RSVP and more info on a location!

Abby handed out something like 25 invites, but it seemed like the timing might not be great for the celebration--a lot of our neighbors were going to be out of town or have moved by that day, so I was hoping her school friends would come through.  By the RSVP deadline, only one neighbor had responded that they would be there...hmmm.  I was really worried that Abby would get her hopes up for a big morning of fun with her friends at the playground, only to have very few people show up.  I tried to prep her for a small playdate (although I was hopeful that some folks would just come without RSVPing), and she was excited to see the family who had RSVP'd.  Unfortunately, this celebration had to get cancelled at the last minute when I got terribly sick out at my sister's house--so I have no idea if folks from school wandered around the playground looking for us that morning...  To make up for my ruining her special day, my mom and sister sprang into action and put together a fun morning celebration at my sister's house when Abby woke up on her birthday!

presents for the birthday girl!

Grandma came to the cupcake rescue!

We came back to our own house the afternoon of Abby's birthday, and had one day at home before we went back out to stay at my parents' house...this time, to prep for Abby's big birthday party!  I had chosen a cake design for Abby's Rapunzel party theme by doing a Google search--I looked for a cake that looked simple and fun.  I found one on this blog, and thought it was something I could do!  It was a pretty straightforward design--one large round cake (for the "water"), a smaller round cake (for the "grass"), and a cute tower made out of cupcakes!

the water layer

grass layer on top!

building the cupcake tower

the finished cake!

The cake wasn't too hard (to check out my previous cakes, click here)--I did spend a few hours on it, and my mom helped tremendously (as always!) by making the icing and colors for me, but it wasn't a stressful experience.  Abby loved her cake, too!

the birthday girl with her cake at the party

Happy birthday to my sweet girl!  :)  The party was great fun, and guess who made a surprise appearance??  Rapunzel herself!  :)

Rapunzel with Abby

Alex's 3rd Birthday!

My baby is three years old!  Alex is our youngest, and it's sort of surreal to me that we have no other little ones after him--when Abby turned 3, Jake was 6 months old, and when Jake turned 3, Alex was 18 months old...we've always had a little one waiting for their turn to turn three.  We have had our last experience with a 2-year-old.  No more terrible twos!  Ha ha--I think the terrible twos are a myth, because the threes aren't much better (and may be worse??), and we have yet to get to the teenage years.  I have no illusions that things are getting easier from here!  Anyway, we celebrated our sweet boy with a Thomas the Tank Engine-themed birthday party, just like Jake had for his third birthday--Alex loves to follow in Jake's footsteps.

my sweet 3-year-old at his party

We just had a small get-together for him after Abby's dance recital--it was mostly family, since folks came to the recital to see Abby and then just came over to our house afterward for cake and ice cream.  I say "small get-together," but nothing is ever really small with my family!  All 7 cousins were running around, plus all the adults--it was chaotic and fun in our little house.  My mom came to stay a few days prior to the party, to help out with all Abby's dance recital prep stuff, and also to help me with the cake--she and I are an unstoppable cake-making machine!  (Click here for a rundown of every birthday cake I've made for the kids up until now!)

For the Thomas theme, I wanted to make a Thomas birthday cake--but not the same one I made for Jake's 3rd birthday in 2012, because it's no fun to repeat cakes!  Thankfully, Wilton has a new Thomas cake pan--they didn't have an available, current Thomas pan when I made Jake's cake, so I had to order their old pan used off ebay in 2012 for Jake's cake.  It was fine, but it was a very complicated cake--Thomas' whole body, and he has a lot of lines and detail that were hard to get right with icing!

Jake's 3rd Birthday Thomas cake in 2012

The new Thomas cake pan is more straightforward (literally and figuratively--Thomas is facing straight forward, so you don't have to do all his bodywork with the new cake!).  Still a time-consuming cake, but not nearly as many starts and stops for me this time around.

getting started--outlining done!

Thomas looks good in blue

never underestimate the difficulty of piping stars on the side of a cake

I probably spent 5 hours icing the cake, off and on while also doing meals and getting the kids down to bed.  I don't know if I'm getting older and therefore less steady with a piping bag, or if I was just tired, but I felt a bit shaky while icing all those stars.  I guess that's to be expected after 5 hours of a cramped hand, but I've never noticed that problem before.  I'm just glad that the stars mask any imperfections caused by a shaky hand!  I think Thomas turned out pretty well:

all done!

in his glory at the party  :)

my birthday boy!

We had a lot of fun and a great celebration of Alex's 3rd birthday!  Now to regroup and prepare for Abby's 7th birthday in just a few days--their birthdays are 11 days apart, but I always try to plan their parties with 2 weeks in between so that I have more time to recover between cakes!  If I was a really smart mommy, I would just move Alex's birthday celebration back to March every year to make my June less crazy--but I wouldn't trade my sweet June babies, even for a less-hectic month of birthdays!  Happy 3rd Birthday to my totally adorable, totally stubborn, sweet boy!

Cake Craziness

Nothing like a whole post about cakes when I'm trying to lose some weight!  My sweet Jake turned 4 last week, and we had his birthday party at my parents' new house over the weekend.  He has grown into such a big boy, and is hitting more milestones every day--like parents always say, it's hard to believe how fast the time has flown.  Here he is on his actual birthday--we went out to dinner with Dan's parents to celebrate.  :)

my sweet 4-year-old!

Jake's party was Jake and the Neverland Pirates themed--my kids enjoy that show, but if Jake had had his way, we would have thrown him another train party (he's obsessed)...his 3rd birthday was a Thomas party.  I didn't want to do a repeat party, so I chose Jake for him, and he was happy with it.  Since I'm not a baker year-round, the one thing I really enjoy doing for my kids' birthdays is their cakes.  I had never decorated a cake before Abby's first birthday party, so I started small with a Wilton cake pan--and lots of my mom's help.

Abby's first birthday cake!

Her second birthday cake was also a Wilton pan, and this time, both my mom and my grandmother helped me out because we were running late (what else is new??).

Abby's 2nd birthday cake--Abby Cadabby from Sesame Street

Abby's third birthday party was a princess party, and Dan and I were on our own in Texas to create something special for her--we settled on a castle cake kit that we found at the store.  Dan helped me level the cake and he carved bricks in the icing for me.  He then decided that he doesn't really like doing cakes...at all!

Abby's 3rd birthday cake--princesses everywhere!

I blame Abby's 4th birthday cake entirely on my mom--we were living with my parents at the time while Dan was deployed, and she and Abby went to Michael's one day and came home with the Wilton Romantic Castle cake kit...apparently Abby saw it in the store and decided that's the cake she wanted, so my mom got it for her.  I was 9 months pregnant with Alex (we literally had her birthday party 3 days before he was born!), and I spent probably 2 weeks researching how I could pull off this gargantuan cake.  There are entire blogs dedicated to this cake, if you can believe it--and thank goodness, because I never could have done it without reading what worked for other people and getting good ideas from them.  My mom and I spent 3 entire days on this cake (even my dad got involved--when the directions called for dowel rods in the turrets, I enlisted his service!), starting with 330 fondant flowers, and ending with this:

Abby's 4th birthday castle cake

Compare Abby's 3rd birthday castle cake (done entirely by Dan and me) with Abby's 4th birthday castle cake (slaved over by my mom and me), and you will clearly note that my mom is the key behind great cakes!  After that monstrosity of a castle, I went low-key for her 5th birthday with another Wilton cake pan.

Abby's 5th birthday Ariel cake

Abby's 6th birthday cake was made mostly by my grandmother--I like to make the kids' cakes every year, but I made an exception because my grandmother made me this same type of cake for my birthday when I was little, so it's a wonderful tradition that I wanted to let Abby experience as well.  I did help a little with the icing, though!

Abby's 6th birthday Hello Kitty doll cake

Update: To see Abby's 7th birthday Rapunzel cake, click here!  :)
 
I'll show you Alex's cakes next--there have only been two!  :)  (Update: Click here for Alex's 3rd birthday Thomas cake!)  His first birthday cake was a Wilton cake pan--I love those things, and how easy they make it for you to be successful.

Alex's first birthday--Mickey Mouse!

Alex's 2nd birthday cake is my sentimental favorite--Dan drew a picture for me, and I hand-carved it myself into the cake and decorated it all without any instructions.  It wasn't big and fancy, but it's ours and no one has ever had a cake like it!  It was the most ownership I've ever taken over a cake--my mom made the icing for me, but I came up with the idea for the cake, made the cardboard template for carving, and iced it all by myself.  The character is one that Dan created when he was in middle school and has been drawing for me ever since we first met--the kids love him, too.

meet WonderMutt--Alex's 2nd birthday cake!

And now onto Jake's cakes!  His first birthday was in Texas, so again I was on my own.  Our good friend Shauna and her cute kids were visiting from Colorado, and I actually thought I would just make cupcakes and have a small little celebration for him...but at the last minute, I started to feel guilty about not making him a cake!  I googled some easy cake ideas, and my friend Shauna and I took a quick trip to Hobby Lobby after the kids went to bed the night before his birthday.  I worked on the cake for a few hours, and both Dan and Shauna thought I was totally OCD and kept telling me to put the spatula down...it's still a running joke.  :)  I have an affinity for this little cake, because again, it was one I just sort of found at the last minute and went for without any real clue what I was doing.

Jake's first birthday cake--a friendly dinosaur!

For Jake's 2nd birthday, we were living at my parents' house--this was just a month before Dan came home from his deployment.  It was the last major holiday of the deployment, and it felt good--throwing your child birthday parties without your spouse is never fun...nor are any other holidays spent apart.  Jake was obsessed with Bob the Builder at the time, so we actually had to get this Wilton cake pan off ebay, since Wilton doesn't make it anymore!

Bob the Builder for Jake's 2nd birthday!

Jake's 3rd birthday was the Thomas the Tank Engine party--he was in heaven.  This was probably his favorite cake!  It's another Wilton cake pan--I toyed with the idea of trying to do a 3-D train (they do actually make pans for those...), but I cut myself some slack and just went with the flat pan!

Jake's 3rd birthday--all aboard!

And that brings us to this past weekend, and Jake's 4th birthday party.  When I picked the Jake and the Neverland Pirates theme, I started googling right away for cake ideas--there's no Wilton cake pan for this theme yet.  I found the least-intimidating non-fondant cake I could find, and went with it--I've used fondant before, but I'm not very comfortable with it...and buttercream tastes better!  Again, this cake had no instructions--all I had was a picture and an idea of how to get it done, so clearly, 6 years of making cakes has made me more confident in my abilities!  My mom did a ton of the work baking the actual sheet cakes and making the icing for me, and my sister-in-law came over for moral support and to help me flip cakes and make creative decisions.  :)  I just had the job of decorating...which I did for eleven hours to create this cake.  Hover over each picture for a more-detailed description of the process!

the beginnings of a pirate boat--3 sheet cakes!

working on the wood planks

the icing was so thick, it popped my icing bag--TWICE!

working on the back of the cake

Jake's 4th birthday cake--Bucky the Pirate Ship!

Now you know why I don't want to let this cake go to waste and keep eating slices after dinner...so much effort, and it really is delicious!  Thankfully for my Challenge, it will either be all gone soon, or it won't be good for much longer.  :)  This cake and the big castle cake have been my biggest undertakings--and this cake didn't seem like it was going to be all that complicated!  Oh well--it was worth it to see my little boy smile.  Happy 4th, Jake!!

my pirate, with the Neverland map Dan drew