Birthday Cake Birthday Party

Alicia asked me to make her a birthday cake this year. Of course I said yes but then later remembered this was going to be a milestone birthday for her. Milestones deserve something out of the ordinary to celebrate. It ended up being a birthday cake party. I spent all day Saturday baking cakes for her, spread them all out on the table and covered them with a total of 30 candles. It was so fun to bake them all, I ended up with 8 and everything was from scratch except for one which was a very modified partychip cake. It was fun to have everyone over and it was especially fun to try all those cakes at once. If you didn't like it, you could just toss your piece away and get a piece of something else, it was great. And everyone went home with plenty of left overs.

Cakes in Progress:

This was after I went shopping the night before. I actually only used half the butter but more than the eggs here.

1pm

4pm6pm

The yellow cake turned out to be a little dry and looking at the pictures I took of my kitchen throughout the day, I think it was because I let it sit out on the counter uncovered for too long.I realized while making these cakes, I hate frosting cakes. I made two three layer cakes and they were such a pain. Delicious, but a pain. This is the chocolate peanut butter cake half assembled.

MaryAnne cake fresh out of the oven Chiffon Cake. I flipped it over and left a hand print on the top it was so squishy. It was flavored with this.Dulce de Leche layers cooling. (can you see the balls of flour in them still. I apparently need to work on my "folding" skill for sponge cakes)

Other things I learned while doing this:

• I wish I had more than one bowl for my mixer.
• When my kitchen gets too dirty, I can't function and have to clean it and start over.
• Making cakes that require different size pans help when making 8 at a time
• You need to cook lemon curd a long time or it'll be too runny
• Whole wheat doesn't belong in cake (that one ended up in the freezer, not at the party)
• I think I could own a bakery. I liked the baking part more than the eating part.

The finished cakes:

Yellow Layer Cake with Fudge Frosting

Chocolate Sour Cream Cake with Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Frosting and Peanut Butter Ganache. (3 layers and weighing in at about half a ton)

MaryAnne Butter Cake with Lemon Curd Cream and Raspberries

Chocolate Angel Food Cake with local farmers' market strawberries

Lavender Lemon Chiffon Cake

with Lavender Flavored Whipped Cream

Planters Punch Cocktail Cake

Dulce de Leche 3 layer Sponge Cake

The square Brown Sugar Coconut Cake sadly got left out of my picture taking. It was actually my favorite of all of them.

James, Alicia's husband, lighting the candles

After we ate as much as we could there was still a lot left!After they all went home with leftovers, there was still a lot left(Besides all those cakes, the rest of the party was pretty fun too.)

Happy Birthday Alicia!

(Some of the time I wish you'd been there to bake all those cakes with me with our cute aprons, but it was fun to do it on my own too. I'm ready for tamales.)