Thursday, May 3, 2012

Birthday Cake Cake Cake Cake Cake Cake

...." and its not even their birthday."

Lego blocks themed cake- vanilla flavored and chocolate cupcakes.
I've been meaning to do a post on my boys birthday cake and cupcakes that I made for their birthday party. Their birthdays are 2 weeks apart so we are able to have joint parties, woo hoo!
Its not like they really understand what's going on anyway....which is why I'm totally going to use this cake/party theme again! And by that time, I hope to improve my skills.

I really did a lot of research via google and pinterest when I decided to go with this theme. Of course its easier to buy a pre-made cake but this was a tad cheaper to me. There were lots of creative cakes, cookies and cake pops decorated like legos or like the yellow lego 'men' but I needed to go with something much more elementary......skills-wise.

I watched a Betty Crocker youtube tutorial on how to go about making this cake.....and then did it my way.

Seeing that I was going to have to freeze the cake to get the icing hard between applying different icing layers, I wanted an extra moist cake....for directions, click here

-Tips to making your cakes/cupcakes extra moist are adding:
 ~1 cup of buttermilk
~1 3oz. package of dry instant pudding (match pudding flavor to cake flavor) 

**If/when using a box cake, mix dry pudding with dry cake mix and add the buttermilk to the wet ingredients of the cake mix. 
The buttermilk is an addition, not a substitution.

This was the best darn cake ever! And I put it in the freezer 3 times! Once to cool after baking and then again after each layer of icing (like in the Betty Crocker vid).

The way I made the pegs was by dipping mini oreos in candy melts!




For party favors, I made 'lego' cookies, but they kind of didn't look like legos to me. Like I said, I need more practice.

Sorry for the blurry picture.
I baked some Pillsbury sugar cookies and trimmed them into squares while they were still hot. Its much easier to do when they're hot versus already cooled.
Then I melted some almond bark in a bowl, like I did with the candy melts and dipped the cookies so that it only covered the top.
Almond bark hardens a bit faster than candy melts (less than 2 mins) so I put the m&m's on quickly after each dip.

Next year, I'll probably just buy a cake. I'm thinking I'll alternate years of baking and buying birthday cakes.

I guess this is a food week for me.
I hope you get some ideas from this post, whether it be the extra moist tips or the Betty Crocker youtube tutorials!

3 comments:

  1. Cute! You are way more hands on with this stuff than me! I'm just starting to explore the baking "thing". lol

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  2. I like to bake. I also rarely bake. The Lego cake is really cute! I plan on making Z's cake this year (we didn't even do anything when he turned 2 last year. He didn't know!). But this year, there will be cake! Still not a party, though; I'm tired.

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  3. Adorable, very cute! Love your creativity. :) Good seeing you back 'round these here parts! lol.

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