September, the Month of Birthdays. And Birthday Cakes.

First, I would like it read into the record that this is my 12th post in September.
Although that's not a record for this blog, it is the most posts of 2013.

 You're welcome.

Here are the September birthday cakes!

Tommy's Notre Dame cake, made the day after ND beat Purdue 31-24 (actually, not so bad, considering this past weekend's loss to Northern Illinois, 55-24.  I don't even want to think about the upcoming Ohio State game . . .)

This is just a 9x13, iced with buttercream.  The goal post are some dowel rod I glued together and spray-painted gold.  He was happy.  And about the cutest 9-year-old I know.

On the same day, we celebrated Maggie's 26th Birthday.  And, because we have a fun trip coming up, I made a Minnie Mouse cake for her.  She shared her cake with her niece, Marley, who came to celebrate with us:

There is a lot of inspiration on the internet for this cake -- you should just try googling Disney cakes and see all the fantastic stuff people are doing!  I have a round cake pan (to make golf balls, basketballs and the like) so Clay (my baker) made a cake in one of the halves to make the Minnie hat.  The ears, bow and dots are fondant, and around the bottom?  Malted milk balls.  Which, as Paul pointed out, don't have milk in the middle.  What's with that?

This past Saturday, we celebrated Paul's 5th birthday.  He wanted a Despicable Me cake, so we sat down at the computer and he picked out this one.  I think he was drawn to it because of the spill.  As a fellow messy person, I was, too.  Here's my re-creation:

Clay's favorite minion is the one sliding down the left side of the cake.  That was a bit of a mistake when I was putting him in position, but it's cute, and something a minion would do.  

Oops.

Marble cake, iced with buttercream.  The minions, letters, moon and lab floor are fondant, and I painted on the spill and the Gru silhouette.  Fun, fun, fun. 

And finally, Griffin's 7th Birthday Lego cake.  Again, there are about a million Lego cakes out there in internet land to study for inspiration.  I cut all those crazy Legos out of fondant, using a pen cap for the dots and gluing them on the rectangles with a little water, and I painted his name Lego-style on a piece of rolled-out fondant.  

So, it's supposed to look like they are mining for Legos, but when I went to WM to find Lego sets for the cake, the closest I could get was a cement mixer (which was too big for the top of the cake, and which I dropped and broke into many, many pieces as I was trying to get this all set up.  Good old Will, who had spent about an hour building it in the first place, re-built it for me, but warned me not to drop it again!)  So, it's not really accurate, but it worked, and Griff was happy.  

White cake, which I split into 4 layers, then used a different color icing between each layer.  The sand is brown sugar.  I did realize, too late, that if this actually were a cake made from legos, on the side you would just see slim stacked rectangles -- no dots.  I think I'd like to try another Lego cake -- lucky for me, Nate said he would like one for his next birthday.  That gives me 5 months to practice!

 Peace,