Paige's 1st Birthday

For Paige's 1st Birthday we had a combined party with her cousin Judah, which meant I needed a bigger cake than I typically make.  With a fish theme, I chose to work on my piping skills as well as trying to add a little 3D effect.  I was able to keep within the color theme with my frosting and was pretty proud of my handiwork on writing Happy Birthday without any secret assistance.  The cupcake fish were a hit with the kids and I was thrilled to see that using candy could add a very nice touch to plain frosting.

Allie's 3rd Birthday

For Allie's birthday I decided to make a shaped cake.  Seeing as this was my first venture into anything like this, it took a lot of experimenting to get it to look right.  I went with a pink crayon for a simple shape but also because she loves to color.  After shaving the cake I covered it with store bought frosting but struggled to get it to look clean around the point.  Afterwards, a friend told me about refrigerating cake to help stiffen it for cutting, as well as putting a small layer of frosting on it (crumb coat) to adhere all the crumbs before putting on the final layers of frosting.  That might have helped with my problems, and I am definitely going to give it a try next time.

Cody's 5th Birthday

This year Cody had his first birthday party with friends over.  He chose a Toy Story theme which offered quite a few options for the cake.  I decided to go with a simple blue and green theme, but try my hand at putting two different colors of frosting on one cake.  As well as making two different size layers.  I did a pretty good job of getting both the layers together without smearing too much of the green onto the blue or vice versa.  I added a couple of store bought decorations as well as some colored M&M's and it turned out pretty cool.