Cakes and Cards! (2019)

We don't start doing holiday-specific things until all the kids' birthdays are over. From mid-November through mid-December, life is a lot of cakes. Then we immediately switch to cards. I ask my kids every year if they really want to crank out a hundred homemade cards again, or if we can just take a picture or skip it. They always want to make cards.

Lots of creativity and construction in our house! Here's the recap of how all of it went. (And no, we haven't dug out of all the mess yet, but at least our tree is up before Christmas.)

First cake of the season was for Quinn just before Thanksgiving. He didn't want a party with friends, but liked the idea of doing something new with the family, so we took him axe throwing. That was a blast. There is a great place a few blocks from our house where they have bouncy houses for all ages, air hockey, pinball, laser tag, and axe throwing. Made for a great day! But there wasn't much of a theme to build a cake around, and Quinn didn't want an axe cake. He just wanted to be surprised, and insisted he'd like whatever I made.


What does the kid like? Cereal. So I went the easy route and simply decorated his cake with cereal.

Ian was nice enough to separate out all the generic brand Fruit Loops by color for me, and we stayed up late and watched TV while I put cereal all over the cake. (My impulse was to mix up all the colors because that would look pretty to me, but Quinn likes order and patterns, so I decided concentric rings in rainbow order was the way to go. Random fact: blue was the rarest of the colors to sort out, and orange is in abundance. Additional random fact: all fruit loops taste the same, regardless of color, and despite what your mind wants you to believe.)

Quinn was surprised and super happy with his cake. (Which was chocolate inside, by the way. He always wants chocolate inside.)

Next up! Mona's cake. She turned 16 this year, and didn't want a friend party either, but did decide it would be fun to go glow bowling out in The Dells with family, so we made a day of it at the end of Thanksgiving weekend along with her uncle and cousin.

Mona did know what she wanted her cake to look like, but told me if it was too hard I didn't have to do it. I like a challenge, however, so it took three tries, but I did it!





Behold the Piñata cake!



We watch a lot of "Nailed It" on Netflix, and on the Mexican version they made little piñata cakes, so I thought I knew what to do. But no. I tried valiantly to make it all out of cake, but no matter how short I made the legs or how many skewers I used to try and support them, those cakes simply collapsed.


I wound up making the legs out of the cake box cut in half, and sculpting the head and ears out of rice crispy treats. Even then, frosting the cake took so much time that I had to take a break and put the cake in the freezer for a while so the ears would stay up.

 

Piping all that frosting on took forever and really wore out my hands, but it was worth it. Because look how cute it came out!


Mona whooped when she saw it, and she laughed, and then she cried, and then she took a million pictures. Totally worth all the work. Plus, when we cut into it, it was full of candy. I hope I never have to make a piñata cake again, but if I do, I will know how to make it work.





 

Here is my one genius tip I can share that I figured out while doing the piñata cake: If you need to switch colors of frosting in the piping bags, but still need the same tip over and over? Put the tip in its own bag and switch out the bags full of colored frosting into that one. Professionals probably have multiples of the same tips, but I don't, so when I realized I could just put a bag inside another bag and go from color to color easily, I was rather proud of myself.


The last cake was Aden's, which she made again herself for the annual "Food for Thought" fundraiser for the Hunger Task Force at her school. She won first place the last three years (her freshman year for her dragon/geode cake, next for her candy sushi plate, and last year for her working chess set). And while looking for links I realized I never posted about her chess board cake, so here's a peek at last year's cake, with pieces all made from modeling chocolate:

We joked this year she should simply make a cake in the shape of a first place trophy. As funny an idea as that was, Aden is too modest for that, so she went with a sandcastle.

 


Aden's sandcastle cake utilized most of my failed piñata cake attempts. (Lest anyone think we were being wasteful!) She kneaded together the crumbled cake with icing the way you do when making cake pops, and sculpted the outer structure of her sandcastle. There were failed attempts to build tall towers using the rice crispy treats that weren't sound enough to survive being transported to her school before she settled on the lower design. The center of the cake was regular cake. The turrets were made of ice cream cones. Everything was covered with icing, then coated with graham cracker crumbs. Aden made her own modeling chocolate to create all the shells and pearls. (She wanted company when she stayed up late the last night to finish it all, so she let me paint all her little shells with food coloring.)


The sandcastle cake was heavy, as well as spectacular. And yes, she won first place again. She even got an extra award for having participated in the fundraiser all four years of her time in high school. (Personally, I think having four amazingly decorated cakes are a cool addition to her portfolio for college.)

 


 




With cakes finally finished, we set in on holiday cards.

I had a thought to make some simple trees out of pretty paper and leave it at that. We make so many, I find it easier if they are basic and identical. But my kids made all of them this year, and the three of them kept switching places in the assembly line (mostly because when Mona gets slap-happy the cards get weird and the other two object, although personally I like the weird). So all the cards are really different from each other this year. And several ended up being assembled upside-down, so if you're someone on our list who gets one of those, it's not some kind of "holiday in crisis" message like an upside-down flag. It's just...kids. They may be 18, 16, and 13 now, but definitely still kids.

Here is a sampling of how some of these cards came out:

It's been a busy birthday/holiday season. Lots of concerts and recitals, lots of people coming and going. One of the best parts of performing at this time of year, is we usually get to do it in some pretty beautiful venues. I never take that for granted.



We even got a new mirror ball for the living room as our family present this year. (Yes, we have a mirror ball year round in our living room.) The old mirror ball's motor died, so we upgraded to a bigger ball. Too big a one, actually, since my brain didn't fully comprehend what going from an 8-inch diameter ball to a 16-inch ball really meant. We also ordered a separate motor with a super handy remote control, but it was REALLY fast (30-something revolutions a minute), so we returned both the giant ball and the fast motor for a more reasonable sized ball (12 inches), and a nice slow motor (about 4 rmp).

So it's been a season full of lights and music and laughter and family, and I don't know what more anyone could want. Well, better health for a few of us. We are hoping for everyone feeling fine in the new year. Beyond that? We're great. Hope you are, too.

Happy Everything, and we'll catch up again in 2020.

Surprise Cakes

This year has been the birthday season of the surprise cakes. 

The first birthday is Quinn's, and he couldn't decide what kind of cake to ask for.  Mona wanted try her hand at making a cake this time, and offered to surprise him.  He liked that idea, and the result was this adorable cat cake.

Pretty much all of this was Mona.  I baked the actual cakes, but Mona did all the sculpting and decorating.  I would like to mention that my end of it was no small deal in that I wound up baking three sets of cakes three days in a row.  Her original idea was a "transfer mouse" from some online game the two of them like to play together, and she wanted it standing.  I tried to explain (based on my vast amount of experience with past cake wrecks) why the way she was going at it wasn't going to work, but some lessons one must apparently learn for oneself.  There was one collapsed cake, then another even more collapsed cake, before Mona finally accepted my adage of "The cake should be wider than it is tall to remain stable" and the cat cake came to be.

We had a nice quiet birthday with Quinn this year.  He made a million cereal treats to take to school both for his classroom and for the after school geography club, and for dinner we tried a new taco truck and ate while watching anime at home.  (I highly recommend the short series "Erased" if you haven't seen it.)

He did love his cake and asked if he, in turn, could surprise Mona with a cake for her birthday.  Mona was scheduled to spend her birthday weekend at a sleepover for a friend whose birthday is on the same day, so Quinn and I decided we needed to make a cake that was easy to transport so she could take it to the party.  It wasn't at all what Mona was expecting because the cake was simply cake-shaped, but I think it came out cool and Quinn did a good job.

We made a "checkerboard cake" which means we used different colored batter in concentric rings in the cake pans so that when the layers were stacked they would look like a checkerboard when you cut into it.  That way the surprise cake had a surprise inside as well.

This one took a couple of tries, because the first attempt was with chocolate cake and white cake, and we learned the hard way that the two textures of cake don't hold together, so we just added different colors to white cake.

Quinn also wanted to go crazy with frosting colors and the piping bags, so we did.

Right before Mona's birthday, though, was another cake decorating/fundraiser event at Aden's school.  Last year Aden made a spectacular dragon and geode cake, and it won first place, but it was too beautiful to cut into and wound up not being the best choice for a fundraiser where people pay to buy slices after the awards.  This year she went with something more accessible: a candy sushi plate.

The fish part is just a basic chocolate cake cut to the right shape and frosted, and I helped again with baking and a bit of the crumb coat which got tricky, but the rest of it was just Aden working late into the night with cereal and marshmallows and candy.  There are Oreo crumbs in there, gummy fish, fruit roll ups, Twizzlers... 

 

I think she did a beautiful job.  (And so did the judges, who awarded her first place for the second year in a row.)
 

My mom was in town briefly in the middle of birthday season and decided to make a collective cake for us to celebrate with all together.  The cake itself was a chocolate chip cake with custard filling that was delicious, but to top it off we put on a "magic candle" we found at the grocery store. 

You light the center wick, the flame gets kind of high (the instructions suggested we should be 3-4 feet away from it), it sparks briefly, then opens like a flower with tiny lit candles that burn down quickly as they make the whole thing spin slowly.  It was also supposed to make music, but we didn't get that to work until after the candles went out.  The package described it as making "continuous music" which is apt, since the only way we could shut it off was to crack the candle housing open and disconnect the battery from the speaker.  We loved that weird thing.

For Aden's birthday she wanted to continue the surprise cake theme and have her siblings make whatever they chose.  They settled on a shield and sword from the Legend of Zelda, which worked out well because Aden had a skating party at Incrediroll again, followed by a sleepover, so we had a cake for each site.

This time we used fondant to decorate with.  I baked a couple of cakes again, but the kids made the fondant themselves and did all the real work.  I helped with some frosting work again, and I cut out the white and yellow fondant bits for the shield, but the rest of it was all Quinn and Mona.

Aden managed to walk into the kitchen at the wrong moment and saw the drawing we were working from which spoiled some of the surprise, but she wasn't expecting two cakes, so part of it was still unexpected.  Cake is cake, though.  Surprise or no, it still tastes good.

Best cake making tip I can share this year is the glory of parchment paper.  We cut out parchment paper to fit along the bottom of all the pans and it made lifting the cakes out to do things with incredibly easy.

In between Quinn's birthday and Mona's birthday is Thanksgiving, and I feel the need to show that not everything we make comes out pretty.  My grandma used to serve orange jello at the big holiday meals, and I inherited her cut-glass jello plate and the mold in the shape of a ring that fits on it perfectly.  I also inherited the recipe, but have yet to make it work. 

The orange jello calls for (appropriately) three boxes of orange jello, orange sherbet, mandarin orange slices, and crushed pineapple.  The problem is this is one of gram's recipes where the amounts of everything are unclear because it just says "a can" or "a box" and we have no idea what the proportions are.  Every year we make a new guess and every year we end up with orange soup.  Luckily orange soup is still delicious, but I think gram would horrified that we're serving a giant bowl of brightly colored goo in her honor on our holiday table.

We'll try again at Christmas.

In the meantime, no more cake for a while.  We are caked out.