By mommie2zs in Cousins — Oct 10, 2019

A Birthday Present To All Of Us

For a local niece’s birthday, Monkey suggested we offer her the chance to spend the day with us and make her own birthday cake. She loved that idea and yesterday was the day.

Our crew was still asleep when she got dropped off in the morning, so she and I had some quiet time to figure out what cake/s sounded good to her. She’s a focused, knows-what-she-wants sort of kiddo, which I love, and she had seen a video with the exact cake she thought would be fun to create. After a little youtube searching, we found it, watched it, and had our plan.

Yessa was up and around by now and ready to head to the grocery store with us to buy supplies.

This was exponentially more skittles than I have ever purchased before.

Or ever will again.

Because we still have 12 pounds of skittles.

The decorating was our main focus for this adventure, so we went with packaged cakes and frosting, and that was a great choice. It helped to make this a stress-free, splendid day.

After we’d purchased all the necessary items, it was time for the baking extravaganza to begin.

We were creating two cakes.

The elaborate vanilla rainbow cake of the birthday girl’s choosing and preference.

And a second, chocolate cake as an olive branch to her family. This niece has a love of bunnies, so we were making the chocolate cake in a bunny tin, but it was definitely not the main focus of the day…as you will see.

Vanilla cakes all mixed up. It was going to be a tall one!

Birthday girl knew from previous experience that the bunny tin was difficult to get the cake to come out of, so we were going to both oil and flour it to give ourselves best odds at success.

While the vanilla cakes were baking, the twosome worked on sorting out the skittles for the eventual decorating.

Buds laughed and shook his head at me lovingly later about the sheer volume of skittles purchased. My goal was to have all the colors the birthday girl needed for the cake, in sufficient numbers that I wouldn’t have to run out to the store. And one of the colors wasn’t available in original skittles, so we had to get this new “darkside” skittles that is now sold.

It all made sense in my mind at the store. The girls even stopped me from buying a third big bag of skittles. Thank God for their common sense.

And so they sorted. Which was quite beautiful.

The vanilla cakes came out.

Bunny cake in.

Here was another lesson for me. In my mind, the bunny tin looked pretty big, so we put in two box mixes.

Yes, it looked pretty full, but how much can cake rise?!

Quite a bit.

The picture above is when we opened the oven door to investigate the burning smell that was the cake batter spilling onto the floor of the oven.

Luckily at some point the birthday girl said, “I don’t really care about the bunny cake. It’s just so my family can have chocolate.”

Bless her.

Bunny cake had some issues.

Ahh, but the vanilla cakes were shaping up to be a thing of beauty.

Buds worked from home on this day, so we left the bunny cake to finish baking with him while the rest of us went out to Panera for a break and to celebrate the birthday girl.

She had eaten her weight in skittles, so she wasn’t too hungry, but we all enjoyed the time out together.

Once we returned home, the work of the rainbow cake truly began.

The duo mixed up a gorgeous pallet of frosting colors.

And the stacking and frosting began.

Once the cake was built, the rainbow adventure commenced.

I was so impressed by the diligence and focus of these two, and their peals of laughter made the day so wonderful. As you can imagine, attaching rows and rows of skittles, with frosting piped in between, will take a fair amount of time, and their good attitudes helped a lot.

I ran to the store for whipped topping because the 5 jars of frosting had been used up on the rainbow cake. (Frosting, also difficult to judge.) We had largely given up on the bunny cake, and were just shooting for something edible.

Looked bad. Tasted fine.