___: Cakes

On Friday Michael had the day off and we planned the birthday party for Kolby and Isaac for that evening. I made a couple of cakes the day before and decorated one to look like Cookie Monster for Kolby. And on Friday we finished getting the house all cleaned up and put up some streamers and ribbons for decorations. I ran to pick up the little cake for Isaac – Mel told me about this deal where you can just call any Albertson’s grocery store and ask them at their bakery about their birthday cake for a child’s 1st birthday, and they will make you a free cake. All you have to do is call at least 24 hours in advance and tell them what you want on it (I guess they can write the child’s name if you want, but it has to say “Happy 1st Birthday!” on it). It’s not a huge cake, but on our boys’ first birthdays we always give them their own cake and set them on the table and let them eat it all by themselves, and then I make other cake(s) for everyone else at the party. So, this free cake worked great for Isaac’s cake. We video-taped him eating it, and he gets the biggest smiles once he actually eats a bite and realizes that it is food. Michael did put Isaac’s face in the cake (as he has done with each of the boys), but he didn’t end up getting too messy from that. Isaac actually didn’t need Daddy’s help to get really messy – by the end of the night he had done a pretty good job of covering his face and hands (and arms, legs, tummy, table, floor, and high chair) with lots of bright multi-colored cake frosting. He probably got the messiest that any of our boys have with their cakes on their 1st birthdays. We found out later that the pink frosting happened to not wash off very well, so if you look close you can still see a few pink spots on Isaac’s forehead and legs today. Camden thought it was pretty exciting that Isaac got his own cake, and that Isaac was nice enough to share some with Camden after he started in on it. The one thing that night that was really frustrating was that the camera ran out of batteries during the party. It didn’t show that the battery was low at all until after the party started, and then it went dead after Isaac started on his cake, but before we brought out the Cookie Monster cake for Kolby. So, I was so sad that we didn’t get a video of Kolby blowing out his candles. But I did remember that Grandma Faun had a digital camera that she’d never used before, so I got that out of it’s box and was able to take several more shots of the kids throughout the evening before the battery ran out on her camera too. I think Kolby really liked his cake – when he saw that I had gotten some blue and black icing, he asked where the brown icing was to make cookies, and I told him that I wasn’t doing that. But I surprised him by putting real cookies all around the outside of the cake. The Eccles and the Mills from the ward were able to come for the party, and the kids all had a lot of fun playing games like Simon Says, What Time is it Mr. Fox?, and Duck, Duck, Goose. And Kolby was excited to show his friends how he could play some songs on the piano right before everyone had to leave. (I am amazed that after taking 2 lessons Kolby can now play a recognizable song with the right timing and everything – we’ve never done the whole music lessons thing before, but I just assumed that it would take a lot longer than that).

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The young women in our ward at church are having a fundraiser at the ward party tomorrow where people will bring desserts and they will be auctioned off to raise money for the girls to go to their summer camp this year. Since we probably couldn’t bid much on the desserts in the auction, I thought we could contribute my making some of the desserts. So, this morning the boys helped me make some cakes. I got some fun icing tubes at the grocery store and googled photos of decorated cakes on the internet to get some ideas. I found several I liked, and I thought that I could probably pull off some of the more simple flower and curly-q designs. So, first we baked the cakes. I had a lot of helpers in the kitchen, but we were doing all right so far. I practiced some of the little flower designs and then got started.

After frosting the cakes I started in on decorating the first one. Here is how it turned out:

It was supposed to look something like this:

I thought it was ok. I knew that my flowers would be a lot more simple than the roses on the picture I found. But I wasn’t too impressed with my results. I am a perfectionist, and I am not satisfied with less-than-professional results on things like decorated cakes, Halloween costumes, and family portraits, but what could I do? I was thinking it might be a little embarrassing to take this cake for the fundraiser auction, since I suppose that everyone else who brings desserts for it will either bring something fancy looking or something really normal, like chocolate chip cookies. But I figured maybe my cake would get sympathy bids in the auction or something. (If all else fails, I guess they’ll give the cake back to us at the end if no one buys it, and we can eat it – it should still taste good, no matter how funny it looks.

So, I tried the second cake. I was going for something with this kind of design:

And this is what I got. Although I didn’t think mine turned out fantastic, I thought it was better than the first one.

By the time I got to the last one, I didn’t have more ideas of how to decorate it, so it didn’t get decorated. Plus, the cake broke a little when I took it out of the pan, so you can see the cracks in the cake through the frosting. Oh well. At least it probably tastes good.

Oh, and remember the first cake I made? Well, by the time I was done with cake #3, this is what it looked like: