Chloe's 4th Birthday

My niece Chloe is all about Hello Kitty right now, so doing a Hello Kitty theme for her birthday party was an obvious choice. She also LOVES Pizza Hut, so that is where we had the party. I volunteered to make the cake and let her choose what she wanted, which meant I ended up buying the Wilton pan for Hello Kitty and using that.

It's not perfect, but I thought it turned out well. I frosted it last night and the black frosting bled onto the pink frosting a bit. That's frustrating but a learning moment.

The cake Chloe picked out was actually a two-tiered cake that used the Hello Kitty pan. I was going to do that but then remembered that in January I ordered personalized cupcake toppers from Etsy. Since I had bought them, I was going to use them. I ended up making 12 regular cupcakes to put the toppers in and 5 square cupcakes to frost and spell out Chloe's name. Chloe wanted her cake to be strawberry, so I just used a mix for the Hello Kitty part. For the cupcakes, I wanted to do something a little more special. I ended up making the Strawberry Cupcake recipe from Better Homes and Gardens which starts with a white cake mix and gets jazzed up from there. (Note: my grocery store did not have strawberries in syrup so I thawed a 16oz bag of whole strawberries, cut them in half, threw in several spoonfuls of sugar, then let it make its own syrup.) The cupcakes were yummy. Several people asked for the recipe. It is one that I would highly recommend.



Yes, there was a lot of cake at the party. Most of it was eaten though. Even if none of it had been, it would have been worth it to see how excited Chloe was.

Happy birthday, Chlo-Bear!

Crystal's Cake

A couple years ago, I started making my friend Crystal's birthday cake. It's a tradition I love (and hopefully she does, too). This year, I found the cake I was going to make in November. In its original form, it was a cake made to look like a Christmas present (and it was chocolate-mint flavored, which is yucky in my book). Last year I modified the cake I made to fit Crystal's tastes. I had planned to do that this year as well...and then I ran across this cake and had a moment of indecision. So I sent Crystal to my Pinterest cake board and she said she loved the look of the tuxedo cake but the snickerdoodle cake she saw sounded good. So, I had my solution: to make the snickerdoodle cake look like a present.

As you can see, the cake is quite large. This is how I did it: I made two batches of the snickerdoodle recipe using two 9x9 pans per batch (four layers total). I added a box of vanilla pudding to the cake recipe because the test cake I made was dry even though I baked it for less time than called for. I also doubled the frosting recipe. I know the icing doesn't look professional, but I keep forgetting to get an offset spatula. I think that would help. This was my first-ever time working with fondant, and I think it looks pretty good when you consider that. I made the bow without any kind of pattern or tutorial and, while it is simple, I was very pleased with the result.

Success? Well, I enjoyed making it and people seemed to enjoy eating it. It literally could have fed a small army.

Now I guess the only question is what I will do next year.