It's great to be 8!

Andrew turned 8 last week and the tradition for birthdays has become that kids help out with decorating their "fancy" birthday cake. (Can you tell it's a number 8?) And as most of our previous cakes, this cake turned into an all day affair, but the final product and memories were worth it.

The night before, we followed a recipe to make a chocolate pound cake. The batter tasted great and Andrew and Izzy had fun helping.

Then Alex and Calvin had fun joining in for the taste testing.=)

I ended up burning the edges a bit but thought we'd be o.k. The next day, we spent most of the morning shopping for the decorations. First, Andrew wanted some playmobil knights. (Not always do we let the kids pick out a present to go on the cake, but sometimes it's a special treat.) So we found the perfect store and he picked out the perfect toy. Then we stopped at 2 other stores til we found the decorating supplies. By the time we got home I was exhausted and planned to take a nap and thought we'd have no problems frosting and decorating later. But Izzy said they'd be able to decorate the rest as long as I got them started. So I pulled out the cakes ... or should I say attempted to. The first cake came out no problems (just a little blackened on the edges and bottom.) The second cake had the top half come out first and then I had to pry out the second half. While working on this, Andrew tasted a burnt edge that had fallen off and almost got sick. I then tested a center bit and he was right. The cake was terrible but I was still determined to get it to look pretty. I pulled out the frosting to glue the top to the bottom and it wouldn't even stick to the cake. Grrrr! I couldn't run to the store because Alex and Calvin were down for naps so I checked the cupboards and luckily had a yellow cake mix. Andrew was o.k. that his cake wouldn't be chocolate after all. He really was sweet and sympathetic that the cake hadn't turned out. So we cooked the cake and I finally got to take a nap while it cooled. That's when the fun began.

We frosted the 2 round cakes with chocolate frosting. Then Andrew and Izzy were in charge of putting the chocolate rock candies on the sides. I made some construction paper stencils for our grass mounds and river.

We then used cool whip adding blue food coloring to make the river around the outside of the stencils. We dropped some chocolate pudding mixed with graham crackers (although this wasn't completely necessary) in the center circles and topped with a thick layer of green sprinkles. Glen made the perfect bridge across the water with pretzel sticks and helped Andrew with playmobil guy placement.

The final product: A perfect 8 shaped cake for an 8 year old boy that likes to play with fighting knights.

Baptism photos to come soon.