AJ’s Rocket Cake!

My little AJ turned 3 on December 13th and I just can’t believe it!  It seems like yesterday that my 19 month old Ryan was calling AJ, “Baby AJ”.  Now my Baby AJ is calling Carson, “My little baby brudder”. 

So for 3/4 of the year AJ wanted a Thomas the Train cake.  When we moved to Colorado we upgraded to cable and the boys fell in love with the show Little Einsteins.  The Thomas shaped hole in his heart was now filled with a red rocket.  This cake would be a bit more tricky to make, but I was determined!  I found a few different recipes from the internet, my best friend when it comes to cake-making,  and I went for it.  I used two cake mixes, twinkies for the boosters, graham crackers for the wings, LOTS of butter frosting, and two yellow Sprees for the lights.  Here’s the making of Rocket…

I started with a 9 X 13 cake that Chris made into an oval.  I also had a smaller sized oval cake.  And a small round cake for the top.

So I learn a little with every cake I make.  This time I learned that you should trim the tops of the cake to make them level so they don’t lean…a major problem I had with the firetruck cake.  I also learned that if you make the frosting the night before it gives the red a chance to become a darker color and if you blanket the top with a damp towel it doesn’t dry out.  Nice tip from Andrea’s Recipes blog.  So now I begin to stack the cakes to form Rocket, but first I frost the bottom layer.

I had my mother-in-law, Mary Ann, in town and she was a cake maker when her boys were young.  She took classes and even had all the fancy gadgets!  She taught me a thing or two, including a trick that was REALLY helpful.  With my firetruck cake I had a problem with the different colored frostings mixing and there were a few places where the frosting turned pink.  So to avoid mixing the colors, she had me (Chris actually) cut the shape of the windows out of cardboard to frost around them.  It worked so well!  I had no mixed colors!

So I added the blue windows and found some Little Einstein (Le0) clipart and added him to the window.  AJ was thrilled and I was quite happy with the finished product.  So three hours later we have…

Happy 3rd Birthday to my special Aven Joseph!  We love you!

Ryan’s Birthday Cakes…

So some of you have been wanting to see pictures of Ryan’s birthday cake this year…Let me just say, I think it’s an improvement from last year.   Just an idea of how far my talent (or lack of) has come, here is Ryan’s cake from last year:

 

…Yes that is supposed to be a Thomas the Tank Engine cake.  He loved it and that was worth the embarassment suffered from the teasings of my family-you know who you are! 🙂

This year Ryan had a fireman themed birthday.  I thought I’d show the progress of the cake in pictures.  I must say, that the only reason this looked even remotely like a fire engine is because there was a video online to watch.  Oh thank goodness for the Internet. 

Here’s the set up:

 

 Here’s the finished the product:

Here’s some more pictures from Ryan’s 4th birthday party.  Stay tuned…I will be attempting another Thomas cake in December for AJ’s 3rd birthday.  It will be a repeat theme, but the kid just loves Thomas!