A Golden Birthday

Today we celebrated a golden birthday - 6 years old on the 6th. Happy Birthday N!!!! He decided he wanted a Noah's Ark cake. Yesterday it was going to be a dinosaur, so we had to do some quick thinking and make a trip to the grocery store for frosted animal cookies.


It was a really simple cake to make - much easier than the dinosaur I had planned. I baked the body of the ark in a pyrex bowl, and the top in a rectangular muffin tin. I intentionally overfilled the muffin tin so the top would bulge out and make a rooftop. I only had white frosting on hand, so I added cocoa and microwaved it a little while to get it soft enough to frost. I used white frosting on the sides of the muffin part and brown on top, and made a window with blue frosting, using brown for shutters. I sorted through the animal cookies and found a few pairs and stuck them on top of the cake.

The original plan was to make a single layer round cake and frost it blue, putting gummy sharks around in the water, and then stick the ark on top of that. I was going to make mini cupcakes and stand the animal cookies up on them. But we're not big cake eaters and it would have taken two cake mixes worth of batter to do all that. We never would have gotten through that much cake, so a simple ark it was. I think it turned out pretty cute.


He was pretty pleased with the cake. He had a nice birthday, even if it was a little hectic. He went skiing all day (you can see his hair is messed up from his helmet). Then the restaurant he wanted to go to was closed so we had to go somewhere else. The place he had picked is a restaurant that is a summer hangout - a place with shakes and ice cream cones. I thought he wanted a shake, but he really wanted a cone. So we compromised by going to the grocery store and letting him pick a carton of ice cream (he chose Peppermint Stick) and buy waffle cones.

While we're talking about birthday cakes, and since I never blogged about it, here's the one I made my youngest when he turned one last November.


It's a car - not any particular car, but done in the style of the movie "Cars" with a smile and eyes.


I had a pan in the car shape because my just-turned-six-year-old wanted a race car cake when he turned 4. I frosted it with the whipped cream frosting (made by adding powdered sugar to whipped cream) and decorated with blue gel icing in a squeeze tube.


The T on the back is for the first letter of his name.

Maybe sometime soon I'll put together a post of all the fun cakes I've done in the past. I've had a lot of fun with them!