Another year, another birthday cake

Once again this year, I created a birthday cake for Austin's birthday party.

To be honest, I'm not really sure what possesses me to do such things. I've written before about how I'm not overly crafty - I never really have been. But over the last few years,I've somehow been compelled to start doing craftier things. My abilities are limited but there are a few things I enjoy doing. Crafting with the kids is one of them (if you can call that crafting, it's really just construction paper, random stuff from around my house or the dollar store, markers and white glue), painting rooms (I've enjoyed that for awhile), scrapbooking (when I can find a free evening to do so) and making cakes (or other kitchen goodies).

So this year's cake, as you can see from the picture, put his age front and centre. After all, 5 is a big number -- it's a whole hand old! I got the idea by doing a Google search for birthday cakes and among the pictures that came up was one of the number 10. And I thought "I could do that but with a 5".

The idea to put a road and the Cars characters on it was an after thought -- when I happened to see those cake toppers at Bulk Barn a few days before Austin's birthday.

Making the cake was actually fairly easy -- a lot easier than the character cakes I've made in the past. I baked two 9x13 cakes and once they cooled I cut the number 5 out of one, iced the bottom one and then stuck the top one to the bottom one. Pretty simple -- although I screwed up icing the bottom one the first time around (too many crumbs) so to solve the problem I made another batch of icing and re-iced it. So we ended up with a double-iced cake with a iced cake on top!

All in all it went over well. Although, when you make a cake that is really two cakes, there's a lot of leftovers.

Next up, what to do for Alex's birthday cake this year.