Everything I know I learned from Duff

One of the perks of having both of my kids born on the same day is that I only have to throw one birthday party a year. Because of that I tend to throw pretty big parties. We pick a theme, cook a big dinner and invite everyone we love...turns out that is quite a few people. Robbie and I both have big families who we spend a lot of time with, which means that not only are our kids close with their grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, they are also close with their great grandparents, great aunts and uncles and second cousins. They also spend a lot of time with us and our friends so many of the people they wanted to invite to their party this year were over 30. What can I say? They love all of their "aunties"!

Anyway, we have a tradition that started with their second birthday of making them a cake that goes with the theme. As the years have gone on, we have gotten bolder and more creative.

This is the cake from their second birthday party. At the time they were obsessed with school buses. It was our first attempt at something that wasn't flat. I think we made 3 or 4 cakes and then built the cake from there. It was pretty straight forward and a little sloppy but we learned a lot.
At the time of their third birthday one of their favorite books was "Starry Safari" so we went with a jungle theme. The kids came over and made binoculars from tp tubes and went on a safari, looking for all of the little plastic animals that we had hidden around the house. The cake was (in my opinion) our best work. It is difficult to see in this picture but the alligator is about 6 feet long. Robbie and I are a good team because he shapes the cake and I decorate it. It's fun for us and we spend a lot of time planning it.

Ooops! Same picture twice. Moving on.

This year, the kids decided that they would have a fire themed birthday party and we really went to town. They wore their firefighter costumes, we decorated the house with flames in the windows and the kids all decorated fire themed cookies (trucks, hats, hydrants, dalmatians). Ben and I even took a trip to the fire station to get fire hats for everyone. The big excitement was our friend came to the door in his firefighter uniform. We even served firehouse chili (which would have been even better if I had remembered the 50 pounds of cheese, sour cream and onions that I had in the fridge...ooops!). Since the day they decided on their theme I knew that I wanted to make a burning building cake. Robbie's idea was a fire truck with a hose that squired whipped cream. Obviously we decided to attempt both. It was touch and go for awhile but in the end we were happy.

We started by baking 18 cakes. Overkill? Maybe.

The next night we began building. Things were going well until we started to put the frosting on and it started leaning. A lot.

We have watched enough "Ace of Cakes" to know that something with any height needs to be supported through the middle. We searched the house and the only thing we could come up with was a paper towel roll. (It's times like this that it might be helpful if I wasn't so afraid of clutter because I am pretty sure that I have thrown away a number of things that would have been better options.)

Then it was still leaning so our only option was to make the building have a nice "entry way" by using the cakes we had set aside for the fire truck to hold up the rest of the building.

Sometimes you just have to know when to quit while you're ahead. As we kept frosting, it seemed to be getting worse and worse. I was getting ready to scrap the whole thing but I decided to leave it until the morning.

The next day, when the cake was hard, we were able to carve the cake into the shape that we wanted and things finally started to look up. By the time Robbie left for work, it turned into something that resembled what I had pictured in my head. Whew!

Oh, and good news! The fire truck worked! Thanks so much to everyone who came. We know it is a little crazy with all (63!) of those people here but it means a lot to all 4 of us that so many of you made a birthday party for four-year-olds a priority on a Saturday evening. Hope you had fun because we sure did!!