5 cake

The second party AKA procrastination excuse was a party for Kid 1, who was turning 5. She was so incredibly excited. So, again, we had almost 30 people at our house, aged 4 weeks to 67 years. Kid 1 and I made a 5 cake for the occasion. This is all my Auntie Joyce's fault. When Kid 1 turned 2, I made her a giant cupcake cake, my aunt witnessed this and passed on a cake decorating book from the days of yore. OK, the book's not THAT dated, but it's from another era. No Dora cakes. No Elmo cakes. We're talking Old School. (As an aside, can I just say how intimidating it is to make food for people who are, if not professional bakers, pretty darn close to being pros. I only like baking for people who have low standards. My brothers, for example, will eat ANYTHING.)

In this book from the days of yore are a set of number cakes. When Kid 1 turned 3, she wanted a 3 cake, then 4 for 4 and, predictably, 5 for age 5. I really liked 4, that was an easy cake to make, just chop up a 13x9 cake the right way. But the 5 was a bit tricky, especially since the book calls for various cake pans that I do not have and don't want to invest in - who needs a 10x3 cake pan, I ask you??? And the book designs make cakes that are quite small. So I got a bit creative. Thanks to making the 3 I have an appropriately-shaped tube-ish pan. It's not a tube like an angel cake pan, nor patterned like a bundt pan. It's a 10 inch diameter pan that yields a 2 inch thick round cake, with rounded edges. I bought it at Williams Sonoma, I think. The tricky part was making a round cake and rectangle cake end up the same height. I ended up having a lot of extra cake (to make cake pops of course, except I think I just gave the cake to my mom for some function of hers).

Here's the yummy chocolate cake with chocolate icing. It's a nice dense chocolate cake and the icing is glorious. The recipes for both come from an old issue of Canadian Living (that I stole from my Mom - she said I could take it, I swear!). The decorations were hastily made, they are marshmallows cut cross-wise with a smartie center. Super easy. What is not super easy is rotating this darn photo. Sorry!

I was happy with the cake and so was the birthday girl.