Tomorrow we are having Kyrie's birthday party at Recreation Outlet. We decided to have the party early since we will be leaving on our trip to Florida next week. This is the largest party we have ever hosted, but I have been too busy to be stressed about it. Mostly, I am just really excited!
Today I made the birthday cakes. I could have ordered one when I ordered the rest of the food we're going to serve, but I feel like making the kids' birthday cakes is one of my gifts to them. Now, I am all about making things easy and as you may know from past posts that usually means cans of frosting from the store. They taste good enough and will cover a cake, but they are just not what you want if you are really doing some decorating. So, I decided to make my own frosting, which is something I have not done since right after Darren & I were married.
So, I got out my trusty, ol' Wilton handbook with all the notes in the margins and made a batch of buttercream frosting. The only thing I changed was that I did not use shortening because of the trans fats. Instead I used unsalted butter, which since I was coloring the frosting the yellow from the butter didn't matter.
I was reminded of several things during this not-so little exercise:
1) NOTHING beats the taste of homemade frosting. Cans of frosting will do in a pinch, but they just can't get that flavor.
2) Making frosting is messy. Or maybe it's just that I'm messy when I make frosting. I don't have a stand mixer anymore, so I used a handmixer, so maybe it would have been less messy with the former. At times there were tiny bits of butter flying out of the bowl and clouds of powdered sugar. A mess, but worth it!
3) Can frosting is even more horrible for decorating than I had thought. Homemade buttercream has a thicker consistency and is just a dream for piping & decoration. The past few years when I had made cakes, I felt very clumsy with the decorating. But with the right frosting, I realized that it wasn't me. Well, not all me anyway!
Kyrie's birthday party theme is ballerina princess, and I had been planning a ballet slipper cake for months now. As our guest list grew, I knew I would need more than one cake, so after rejecting several other outlandish ideas (with Darren's help) I decided to do just a simple round. I am really pleased with how they both turned out. One has a lemon filling, per Kyrie's request, and the other has a chocolate filling. I also made a few cupakes in case guests would rather not have a filling.
So, here are Kyrie's birthday cakes. One thing I wish I would have done differently is covering the cake board with pink paper. If I would have used a different color I think that the cake would have popped a bit more. But that's such a trivial thing that I won't spend any more time than that one second thinking about it. Oh, and I forgot the edible glitter, which I probably could have put on after the fact, but I was just too tired at that point.
(I always feel like I post too many pictures of my cakes, but I am pretty proud of how they turned out.)
My kids have definitely inherited my sweet tooth. I had to shoo them away from my frosting several times over the course of the afternoon. I promised Kyrie she could have some of the frosting when I was all done. Here she is sucking down some frosting straight from the piping bag... lovely!
But at least she shared with her brother!
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