My Little Man turned eight a few weeks ago. I’m still in shock over the whole thing, I think. Where did my baby go?
He’s not the slightest bit interested in anything sentimental about birthdays, though – he’s too excited about the birthday fun! Part of that is choosing a birthday cake.
Now, I *tried* as a young 4-Her to learn something about cake decorating, but one season of washing icing-covered beaters cured me of that dream quickly. I wish now that I had stuck with it, but ….so it goes. The kids don’t seem to my mind my lack of skill and just have fun laughing at the zany cakes we come up with.
After several years of choosing simple, easy cakes, this year My Little Man asked for a gummy bear fishing off of a dock in a lake. He wanted a basket of fish, too.
Seriously?
The best part of these wacky cakes is breaking out the candy and trying to fit things together.
We started with a simple sheet cake and covered it in blue and green icing. (My mom’s the expert birthday icing maker. I always mess it up somehow.) I bought generic icing/glue-in-a-can to hold pretzel logs together and carefully stacked a ‘dock.’ I found large cinnamon gummy bears at Target, and after tying some thread around a toothpick, I stabbed it in the general vicinity of his hand. The bottom of an ice cream cone became an out-of-proportionate fish basket, and Swedish fish were tossed in the basket and carefully poked out of the lake.
After all of that candy slicing and dicing, the cake still looked mournfully bare, so we went back to work. Some fruit leather became simple tent with gummies sleeping inside. Chocolate-covered raisins made a campfire ring, with more fruit leather for flames. Another cone covered in icing and rolled in green sanding sugar became a pine tree.
In no way is this any sort of expert cake – in fact, it’s so far from that that it’s laughable. What it is, though, is memorable – and fun. Our kids love dreaming up these crazy birthday cakes, and they get a kick out of seeing their plans turned into sugar and bright colors. I’m definitely no food artist, and by cake decorating time the birthday celebration has me lacking a LOT of sleep, but somehow that makes this creative process even more fun. I’m not good at it, but the kids think I am; they dream and I build and every year we reminisce of cakes gone by.
Remember the crab cake? His legs were so good!
Remember how Papa ran to the store just before it closed because the castle cake fell apart and we had to start all over – at midnight? Remember how hard we prayed that it would stay together until the party – and even though one tower slid, you never noticed?
Remember the gummies zip-lining across your cake the year that you first went to camp?
Any cake artist – probably anybody – could make a more professional and nicer looking cake. It’s definitely not my forte; but no fancy cake could give us the memories and the laughter and the fun that we’re storing away by stretching ourselves and doing it together.
So your kid wants a ____ cake? Break out the Gummies, the food coloring, the toothpicks and the candy stash. You’ve got this.
What are your family’s special birthday traditions?
