1 Week + 3 Parties = 4 Year Old Boy (Making the Simple Complicated – It’s What I Do)

I always enjoy planning Kyle's birthday parties. I love making lists, looking for ideas, finding just the right decorations, and the general anticipation of it all. The past 3 years his parties included beautiful, professionally decorated cakes. This year I was feeling creative and thrifty so I decided to bake and decorate his cakes myself.

The first celebration was simple, I made these yummy and addictive cookies for his Bible study class. (Do yourself a favor and don't try these - unless you have some larger clothes set aside you've been hoping to fit into.)

For his next party, I was a little more ambitious. We had decided a few weeks ago that I would make him a Little Bear cake. (If you have kids and don't have this sweet book, you're missing out! It -- along with several other books from a (retired?) teacher -- was one of my favorite garage sale finds.)

I thought about buying a special cake pan, but that went against my thrifty inclination. I also had visions of part of the cake sticking to the pan (yes, it has happened to me before and I had to take a mangled-should-have-been-a-bundt cake to a family dinner -- at least it tasted good which is more than I can say for my crunchy non-boiled noodle lasagna I once served at a family function, but I digress) so I decided to be homespun and just bake the cake in my glass pyrex dish and let it stay in there.

I worked from a printed image of Little Bear which I laminated. I frosted the sky and grass background first, then I traced around my cut-out Little Bear with a cake tester and filled him in with frosting. I then went back and smoothed it all out with my fingers which I kept wet by dipping in a bowl of water. (For those of you who ate the cake, no worries, I am meticulous about hand washing. :-) )

I had no faith in my ability to neatly letter in frosting, so I printed the Happy Birthday message and got out Kyle's watercolor paints, then I laminated it and put it on the cake. Here is the result:

Little Bear looks a little sad, I discovered it's not easy to convey wistful happiness with frosting.

I had not done any planning for his next party, which is totally not like me. But once his party on Friday was over I started looking for inspiration. He has always loved playing Little People, but we felt like he was outgrowing them. Some of his friends have a castle and some knights that Kyle really likes and we thought it would be neat to tie that in with talking about the armor of God from Ephesians 6. So we packed the Little People away until Cade is older and we got Kyle this castle for his birthday (we found a great deal on one!).

I tossed around ideas for a castle cake, but it was more than I wanted to tackle, then when I was playing castle and knights with Kyle I came up with the idea of doing a shield cake.

I thought a cookie would be easy to do in the shape of a shield and it was. I anticipated needing to trim the big cookie by hand after baking, but it held it's shape really well during baking so I didn't need to mess with it at all.

I wanted a deep blue frosting for the background, but bakers must have some special, more intense food coloring than what I have because the darkest I could get was turquoise. I have always liked the fleur-de-lis symbol and found out while planning the cake/cookie that one of it's meanings has to do with the trinity which is a neat bonus.

I thought I could melt white chocolate to just the right temperature so that I could trace an image of the fleur-de-lis I had cut out and laminated, but try as I might this method did not work!

I didn't give up though. After much trial and error and close to two hours later, I had three fleur-de-lis. The method that ended up working was painting the melted chocolate onto the back of the laminated image with a silicone pastry brush, then freezing that and peeling the image off. This was pretty tedious, but it worked well.

Then I needed a way to display the shield. I wanted it to be silvery-shiny like armor so I covered my rectangular stoneware with white freezer paper and colored it gray. I wasn't quite satisfied so I got out some never-used metallic silver eye shadow and rubbed it all over the paper with my fingers. Then I covered that with plastic wrap. I had room around the edge of the shield for the birthday message. (It just occurred to me that foil is silver and shiny - duh! Oh well, my method was more fun.) This is the final result:

I started almost every paragraph with "I" that probably isn't good.

I don't know why there isn't a line between my paragraphs toward the end of the post. Probably because posts aren't supposed to be this long. Anyone who is actually reading down to this last sentence deserves some kind of prize.