Saturday, March 31, 2012

Cat in the Hat Cake for Caleb


On Wednesday our Caleb officially turned 3 years old! Since Caleb didn’t have preschool on his birthday, I got the joy of getting to spend good ‘ol quality time with the birthday boy. In addition to opening and playing with presents, we also spent the morning chalking some artwork on the driveway. I was pretty impressed how Caleb was able to imitate my chalk drawing of a sun!

To celebrate his birthday I decided to bake him a “Cat in the Hat” Red Velvet birthday cake. Caleb loves to watch the show “The Cat in the Hat”, and since the Cat’s hat is red and white, a Red Velvet cake seemed like a perfect fit! I chose this recipe because it was similar to the Waldorf Astoria’s Red Velvet Cake recipe, but not as complicated:

The only change I made to this recipe was that I baked the cake in a 9 X 13 inch pan (instead of the round pans) for 20 min. at 345 degrees. Then during Caleb’s naptime, I cut the cooled cake into 2 layers (carefully!), frosted it with cream cheese frosting, and topped it with a “Cat in the Hat” fondant topper I bought from Etsy.com on sale. Later in the afternoon while he was playing with Aidan in the backyard, I piped blue cream cheese frosting for the border and lettering of the cake and had Aidan decorate the sides with red M&M’s while Caleb was looking for big sticks in the backyard.

After dinner, we surprised Caleb with his special “Cat in the Hat” birthday hat and ushered him to his birthday cake at the table. When Caleb saw his birthday cake he exclaimed, “The Cat in the Hat!” and did a little dance in his chair while Aidan proudly told everyone, “I put on the M&M’s”. Happy Birthday Caleb! We love you!

Monday, March 26, 2012

Caleb's Cupcakes



This week our Caleb is turning 3 years old! It is crazy to think that three wonderful years have already gone by since we brought him home from the hospital….Probably what is more crazy is the fact that he is having 3 little celebrations this week for his birthday. The first one is with his class at preschool during lunch time. For this little party I decided to bake chocolate-chocolate chip miniature cupcakes, with a vanilla buttercream frosting, topped with mini M&M’s.

When it comes to cakes, both my boys always choose chocolate cake. I spent some time looking at different chocolate cake recipes on the internet and finally settled on this one for the chocolate cupcakes for Caleb’s preschool: 


After sampling one of the cupcakes, I felt like only 1 cup of mini chocolate chips would have been sufficient for the recipe in order to achieve a chocolate-chip taste for the cupcakes (even ½ cup if you are going for only a hint of meltly chocolate chips within the cupcakes).  For the frosting I chose this recipe:


I ended up only using 3 cups of powdered sugar instead of 4 though (I’m a big fan of Italian meringue frostings thanks to CakeLove cupcakes, so when it comes to any kind of frosting I prefer that it doesn’t taste too sweet). The frosting was definitely good! Light, mildly sweet, and whippy.

Once the cupcakes were frosted, I topped them with some mini M&M’s and headed off to Caleb’s preschool. When Caleb saw me walk in with the cupcakes, he exclaimed, “Mommy, you brought my birthday!” So cute!



The only problem I realized I had today was that there were only 12 kids in Caleb’s class and I made 48 mini cupcakes! Luckily, I managed to give a lot of them away to friends and family, so now we are only left with 17 mini cupcakes to finish before I bake Caleb’s "Cat in the Hat" birthday cake on Wednesday (for his actual birthday). I’m pretty sure I’ll be sick of cake by the end of this week…