Birthday Cakes

Inspired largely by fond memories of our childhood birthday cakes, we decided that we would make Anders an extraordinary cake for his first birthday. But before we go into that, I thought it would be fun to take a quick look back at some of those inspirational cakes that we had as kids.

For my second birthday, my Aunt Jill made me a merry-go-around (or is it circus tent?) cake.

Mike's 2nd Birthday: Merry-Go-'Round(?) Cake

I actually don't have a lot of pictures of my various birthday cakes, as most of the photos are still with my parents. I do have a few good birthday cake stories, though. When I was turning somewhere around 9 or 10 and my brother Drew was turning 3 or 4 (our birthdays are only a day apart), my birthday cake was sitting on the dining room table awaiting the arrival of the guests. But before anyone arrived, Drew decided that it would be fun to put his arm into middle of the cake. Oops.

And a few years after that my parents arranged a birthday party for me at the local roller rink, which was a pretty cool party setting in the 80s (actually, I wouldn't mind a roller-skating party now, either.) Everything was going great until the rink brought out the cake that they had made for my party, and the icing read: "Happy Birthday, Michelle." Decidedly uncool.

Corinne has very fond memories of some of the creative cakes that her mom made for her and her brothers when they were little. We recently dragged out the photo boxes, warmed up the scanner and brought those memories back to life.

Leif & Loren's 2nd Birthday: Circus
(I guess that must be the official 2nd birthday theme)

Corinne's 5th Birthday: Lamb

L&L's 5th Birthday: Trains
(These would become a recurring theme, as you'll see)

Corinne's 7th Birthday: Strawberry Shortcake

L&L's 7th Birthday: Trains (again)

L&L's 8th Birthday: Snoopy

L&L's 11th Birthday: Fishing

L&L's 12th Birthday: Trains

So with cakes and stories like those, we knew we wanted to do something memorable. (Of course, Anders is probably still too small to remember it himself, but that's beside the point.) Corinne decided that for Anders's first birthday she would make him a Rocket cake.

With a little searching online, she found some example cakes to use as a starting point. She picked out her favorite cake and frosting recipes, ordered cake molds and frosting tints, and set out to make the coolest birthday cake ever. The design consisted of a Rocket sitting atop a double sheet cake base. The rocket portion would be banana cake (Anders loves bananas) and the base two chocolate cakes with chocolate sour cream frosting. Since we're fairly proficient in the kitchen, making the actual cakes would be the easy part; the real challenge would be in the decorating.

Once Anders was in bed on the night before the birthday party, Corinne pulled out the cakes to decorate. It was a painstaking process that lasted late into the night; I think we finished close to 1:00am. But we think that the end result warranted the extra effort.

And now, the final result!

With the cake done, the only thing left was the party!

- Mike, Corinne, and Anders Rocket

Date: September 19th, 2009