I love a good party: He's Three!

"Happy birthday to you"


It was all trains for Pete's third birthday party.

The cake was a success (and the frosting, too, which I find utterly miraculous). I am not good at decorating cakes. Like those little roses and writing and, well, creating anything with frosting that is supposed to look like something? Not my forte. I had to be outside the birthday cake mold on this one.


It was to be a mountain cake with a train comin' round it.


Do I think too much about this stuff? Last night, I was thinking, what if I had a boss who told me that I had to do this stuff as part of my job. I would think she was totally nuts as she explained: "So, tomorrow, I need you to figure out how to make a mountain cake...you need a domed cake mold, but don't pay a lot of money for it. Just find a cake mold for, hmm, maybe one dollar. And then, in a couple weeks, figure out how to make your newborn look like a banana..." More to come on the banana baby later. I just keep telling myself: I'm using the same skill set as my former professional, blow-dried, black-suited, put-together self. It's just a different application of my skill set. Right? riiiight?



Anyway, I found my one-dollar domed cake mold. I baked the cakes a few days earlier and froze them (using this favorite cake and frosting recipe which I will now always use for yellow cake and chocolate frosting)
Why pay for one of those white-noise machines when you have a perfectly good KitchenAid?

I then left the actual construction up to my very capable husband. Shaner is a procedure man; one who has sutured and poked and extracted. I leave the fingernail clipping, the bath giving, and the cake constructing up to his steady hands. The results were my vision realized! I patted myself on the back for delegating this task to just the right hunk of burning love.



And the only thing left to do for Pete and I was to adorn our mountain with little lego pirates and knights and trees and horsies. I call this cake a success!

Ok, so maybe not suitable for the cover of Martha Stewart Living, but Pete thought it was awesome.

We had a modest spread of train-shaped pb&js, popcorn, and crackers with apple juice. I tried to keep it all low-key this time around, given the recent events (that is, bringing baby brother to this world a couple weeks earlier. oh man.)




And, for party favors, I found these little engineer hats and train whistles at Oriental Trading. Pete likes his homeboy style.