Finn McMissile Cake

We officially have started the festivities for Levi's birthday, and it's still almost 2 weeks until his big day. His real birthday is March 30th. In order to have a gathering of all our friends and their kids we decided to roll Levi's 2nd birthday and our friend's son Tristan's 1st birthday into one big ole bash. What  a great idea, it was a fantastic party. This post I'm dedicating solely to the cake I made for this big ole bash. For a couple reasons, first of all I'm very proud of how it turned out (both in look and in taste), and secondly because I have oodles of photos from making the cake and the party itself, and one post is just not enough space to display all the photos I want to show the world.

The story behind the choice of cake stems mainly from Levi's obsession with his Finn McMissile HotWheels car (and in part from Tristan, who is turning one, really not caring what kind of cake I made). Levi has spent the past 5 or 6 weeks quite attached to his Finn McMissile, he calls it "min-micmisso", he has even refused to go to bed without it, and of course has had numerous ownership battles with his brother over "min-micmisso". We have even gone out and bought a few more McMissiles to keep the fighting to a minimum, but for some reason they only seem to want the one that the other already has, hmm funny. Another reason for the cake choice is redemption, I had attempted (key word) to make a dump truck for Gavin's second birthday, which fell apart before it got to the party, and I wanted to prove that I could make a 3D cake of a vehicle.

The marathon cake baking started out Thursday, I stayed up to 3am baking red velvet cakes and making both buttercream and fondant icing. I found a fantastic recipe for red velvet cake that used beets to colour it red instead of dye, and it even tasted pretty great! Friday I worked a 12hour night, so the official cake decorating began after 3ish hours of sleep on Saturday morning. Good thing I started in the afternoon, and not later in the evening (like I usually do), because I realized that I hadn't baked enough cake or made enough icing to have Finn McMissile come out in the right proportions. I am super-unbelievably lucky to have the most supportive husband in the world, he ran to the grocery store for me and even printed up pictures of Finn so I could get the cake just right. And despite his feeling very unwell, he stayed up until 1am Saturday night helping me carve and ice the cake. I wasn't quite so lucky to go to bed that early, I was up until 4am creating my masterpiece, with National Lampoon's Vacation keeping me company/awake while I decorated.

The sleep deprivation was well worth it, Levi loved the cake! When he saw it in the morning he said "mic-misso, mic-misso!" And of course he couldn't keep his fingers off it, he even poked a little hole in the fondant before we left from home.

 Me Putting Together the Layers of the Cake

 Carved But Not Yet Iced, My Amazing Husband Helps, Buttercream Layer Done, Fondant Started

Tired But Happy, Me With a Finished Cake



My Baby Boy and His Cake

As Levi Would Say..."TaDa!"

The Finished Product

Cutting Into the Cake

The Birthday Party Saga

Mikayla's birthday was a whole week ago now, but it has pretty much taken me that long to recover! Why does it seem that birthdays seem to take more than one day to celebrate? This year Mikayla's birthday took 5 full days to celebrate. In those 5 days I managed to bake almost 6 dozen cupcakes, 3 dozen cakepops and one cake.


Day 1 was cupcakes to school... but we got there with our beautiful cupcakes just to find out that it was one of her classmates' birthday and he had also brought cupcakes that day. I figured both Mikayla and her classmate deserved to have their "day in the spotlight", so I took those beautiful cupcakes home. Mikayla was only a little disappointed, but I think she understood why.

Day 2 was a family dinner at my sister-in-law's new house. We were celebrating Mikayla's birthday, as well as Jan's and his grandmother's. So, we brought with us cakepops (Jan's request) and a cake.

Day 3 was Mikayla's real birthday. No new baking for that day (thank goodness), we had all sorts of left overs to eat up. We woke the birthday girl in the morning singing "Happy Birthday" and bringing her presents in bed. Then off to the mall for a little birthday shopping trip. She is definitely in training for teenagerhood, going to the mall is one of her favourite things to do.

Day 4 was her big party with her friends. Mikayla had requested "Monster High" as the theme for this party. For those of you who haven't heard of Monster High, it's pretty much Barbie Dolls that are the kids of famous monsters. We had this party at a rec centre, the kids got an hour to play in the gym, and then we had an hour for food, cupcakes and presents. The best part about not having the party at our house... no clean up, hurray! I think everyone had a pretty good time, as far as birthday parties go it went pretty smoothly.

Day 5 was actually taking cupcakes to school. Of course, the original cupcakes had been eaten already so it was more baking for me. Don't tell anyone, I used a cake mix, shhhhh. But they turned out quite nice.

Overall, a pretty excellent birthday for a pretty excellent little girl.

Valentines Cookies

It seams every holiday or important event in our house these days is anticipated with such excitment. I shouldn't have been surprised when Mikayla showed up in our bedroom at 4:30 on Valentines morning. Ugh. No rest for the momma.
Daddy had to go to site that morning as well, so we had an early morning card exchange and let the munchkins eat copious amounts of sugar for breakfast!
And in keeping with the sugary theme of the morning we made DE-LISH-US Valentines cookies for Mika to take to school, and of course for our own consumption as well. I was not happy with the usual sugar cookie recipe I had been using for a number of years, so I decided to go on-line and find something new. Fortunately it paid off this time, the new recipe was by far superior to my (now deceased) old recipe.

I also decided to change things up by icing the cookies with a butter-cream instead of my usual royal icing, this too was a change in the right direction.
Baking with 3 "helpers" is always, umm, interesting? There is more often than not a fight over who is pouring in an ingredient, or who's turn it is to mix, who is taking someone's spot on the step stool, and so-on...

This baking session went relatively smoothly, although I did have to force everyone downstairs at one point for me to just get things done. (Thank you TV and/or Wii for your babysitting services). All in all a successful morning of baking, and 2 dozen beautiful cookies sent to school.

The baking continued in the afternoon with only Gavin and myself, what a treat to have just one little set of fingers to keep away from snatching the cookie dough.