For my son’s 5th birthday (yes, again…we wanted to celebrate it in the beautiful summer weather!), he wanted a dinosaur themed party.  He couldn’t make up his mind what kind of cake he wanted, then finally chose a Triceratops cake.

The body is made of chocolate cake semicircles, stacked, with rounded sides up.  The legs are made of carrot cake baked in tomato sauce cans and the head is made of carrot cake baked in an egg shaped pan.  As you may have guessed, I made the horns, tail, and crest out of rice krispies treats.

I also made ~200 dinosaur cookies (brontosaurus, tyrannosaurus, triceratops, stegosaurus, pterodactyl) to give away as prizes for the games.

Since my son is older, we were able to play a lot of fun, dinosaur-themed games, like:

- Tyrannosaurus fossil dig (made fake bones out of plaster of paris using fossil molds); the kids had fun looking for fossils in the sand and then putting them together to form the Tyrannosaurus skeletons

- Dinosaur egg hunt (bought large plush Brontosaurus toys and stuffed them in large, handmade eggs); the kids had fun searching for the large eggs with their name on it

- Hot lava race; the kids, grouped into teams, had fun racing to put “hot lava” in their buckets using turkey basters

What a fabulousaurus day it was!

My friend’s daughter wanted to celebrate her 7th birthday party at a planetarium.  It was a fabulous idea and my kids had so much fun learning about stars and planets.  Since she was planning for a large turn-out, I decided to surprise her with a solar system cake…yes, that’s right, a solar system cake…or rather cakes.

I knew it would be too much to do it to scale, so I just decided to make the planets out of cake.  I made a total of 5-6 batches of cake batter and used spherical (ball) molds for the planets.  I made a total of 4 spherical jello cakes using 4 halves of the ball pan sculpted into spheres,  2 spherical chocolate cakes using 4 halves of the ball pan (these were slightly larger than the 4 jello cakes), 1 spherical carrot cake using 2 halves of the ball pan, and 1 chocolate muffin shaped into a sphere for Mercury.  I decided not to add Pluto since it was recently declared a dwarf planet.

Although Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune actually have planetary rings, I decided to just make a ring for Saturn since it is the most visible among the other planets.  I piped white chocolate into a ring and sprinkled metallic sugar crystals to simulate the bits of ice and rock in real planetary rings.  I used cream cheese frosting for the chocolate and carrot cakes and whipped cream frosting for the jello cakes.  Since I did not want to go through the effort of baking a huge Sun, I decided to make a big popcorn ball instead.  I’m glad it was a hit with the kids!

It’s a little too complicated to explain how I managed to levitate the cakes, so I won’t go into details.  Suffice to say, I took the opportunity to elevate my cakes to a new level (as my aunt Martha would say).

My friend was expecting a Hello Kitty cake for her baby shower, but she was not expecting a 3D Hello Kitty head!  I was glad I could surprise her!

I used 3 oval cake pans for the head and a 6×6″ square pan (2 corners) for the ears.  Although I pre-sculpted the oval cakes to shape the head, the head got taller than I anticipated after I started filling the yellow butter cake layers with sliced strawberries and whipped cream.   It doesn’t look exactly like Hello Kitty, but I think it is close enough!  I also melted chocolate to pipe the eyes, nose, and bow and used chocolate covered pocky sticks for the whiskers.

What better way to celebrate summer than with butterfly cakes?  Yum!  I made 2 butterfly cakes (one jello cake w/ whipped cream and one chocolate cake w/ cream cheese frosting filling) for a friend’s daughter’s birthday party.  All the little girls got cute fairy wings at the party, so the butterfly cakes were a great complement.

Can you tell how I cut the cakes?  For one butterfly, I used two 8×1.5 round pans.  I stacked the cakes, cut it in half, and then cut each half into 1/3.  So, start the cut a third from the long side of the half circle to a third from the round side of the half circle.  I used a long donut for the body and placed the rounded sides of the half circles alongside of the body to create the wings.  I used whipped cream to frost the cakes and tinted the whipped cream to color the wings.  You can pretty much use sprinkles and other types of candy to further decorate the wings.

For my cousin’s daughter’s 1st birthday party, I decided to make 2 ladybugs lounging on a big leaf.  For the ladybug bodies, I used a ball pan and shaped the head from the “bump” of the cake, rising from baking, in the ball pan.  For the giant leaf, I used two 9×13 pans…I had very little cake scraps left!  I made lemon cakes with raspberry curd filling and whipped cream frosting for the ladybugs and leaf.  I piped melted chocolate to create the antennas (which you don’t see here as I added them when we got to the party and this is a pix before).