Superhero Birthday Party

Cake and Cookies for my grandson's 4th birthday.

The cake is actually four 6" cakes individually iced and put together on a 14" cake board.

They were blue and yellow on the inside made with rainbow chip cake mix and cherry chip cake mix. Gasp! Yes, I used a cake mix. I read that boxed mixes take food colouring better than homemade but 

I have also had success with "jacked up" boxed mixes in the past. I do 4 eggs, sometimes butter instead of oil and I use mild instead of water. It makes a big difference and it is a convenient shortcut when pressed for time. Nobody complained and all of the cake was eaten eventually so I really don't apologize for using a mix in this instance. I forgot to take a picture of the inside of the cake - I can't believe I could forget that but they were dyed blue and yellow and looked and tasted delicious.

The cake toppers were cookies - I made four sugar cookies that were over 3" round and thinner than the other cookies to place on the cake instead of fiddling with fondant. I just wasn't up to dying fondant, rolling it out, shaping it and keeping it from drying out etc. I love the look of fondant cakes and the decorations but I have very little space to work with and to be perfectly honest, very little patience for all of that but nobody minded and it looked pretty good as it was. The icings were vanilla buttercream and almond/cherry buttercream.

The cookies were made using my go-to sugar cookie favourite: Sweet Sugarbelle's sugar cookie recipe and her royal icing recipe - but I used Kirkland Pure Vanilla Extract and Nielson-Massey Vanilla Bean Paste for the cookie dough instead of Sugarbelle's preferred almond extract. 

John Deere-like cookies and cupcakes

Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes with Vanilla Buttercream Frosting and fondant tractor toppers

I used Wilton fondant. The green, yellow and white are as they came in the package, I added Americolor Super Black gel food coloring to fondant to make it black. I did the original image on the computer, printed it out, cut it out and then used it as a template for the tractor - all in green. The I cut out yellow and black circles for the tires, additional green pieces for the fenders and white windows. This was my first time making fondant toppers - I'm so happy that they were a success.

Vanilla sugar cookies with royal icing

I had no idea that John Deere was so popular with little boys! I have had two 3 year old boys to do cookies for in the last 4 months. Apparently they really love JD.

Birthday Boy Cookies

I made all sorts of cookies for my grandson's first birthday party. He was the only little one there the rest of the guests were adults (about 16 of them) who could really enjoy all of the food we had served. Of course, I wanted everything to be special so as usual, I over did - what can I say? that's just me!
I made cookies shaped like # 1s and decorated like Tigger, his favorite of the Winnie the Pooh characters. I didn't have any number cookie cutters so I used a paper template and a knife to cut out the 1s.

I did baseballs with his name and his age - baseballs because his grandpa wants Ben's favorite sport to be baseball. I also did flower cookies on sticks which I displayed in pails of packed brown sugar.

I know - flowers are not "girly" but there were going to be ladies there and I thought they'd look cute as part of the table decorations. My daughter helped me decorate the flowers. I also did cupcake cookies and other flower cookies as well.

The birthday boy was oblivious to all of my hard work but it seemed to be appreciated by some of the guests - ultimately, I was happy with it and was just thrilled to be able to spend the day with the people who love Ben and wanted to share in celebrating his 1st birthday.

Birthday Girl Cookies

These cookies were made for a little girl who was turning 7 - her party theme was cupcakes, so of course the cookies had to be cupcakes in girly colors. 

These cookies were made using the sugar cookie recipe from Sugarbelle's site. This dough is easy to work with and tastes great with different flavorings - for these cookies, I used pure almond extract to flavor the dough and I used Wilton clear artificial vanilla to flavor the royal icing. I haven't found anything else that is "oil free" to use for the royal icing. If anyone knows of any other oil-free flavorings, please let me know, I'd love to try something different. I make my dough using a mixer, someday, my mixer will go ca put on me because of the volume of cookie dough, cake batter, buttercream and mostly - royal icing that I make. My goal is to be able to buy a KitchenAid stand mixer - they are beautiful  and seem to be the stand mixer of choice with most bakers. Someday.... I can dream :)

Just had to make a special cookie for the birthday girl herself :)

I don't have cookie cutters for the cupcake or the tiara so I did templates on paper and used them to cut out the cookie dough using a knife - it takes longer than using a cutter and is a bit of a pain but you gotta do what you gotta do!