Birthday Bash with Fish Cupcake Cake and Bubbles at the Beach!

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This past Thursday, July 30th,  our youngest daughter turned 2!   I'm not sure who had more fun on her birthday and then at her party the day after?  Our sweet 2 year old, me, my husband, our 4 other children or our friends? :)

Here is our sweet girl with her favorite book, Goodnight Moon. On her birthday in the morning we went to her weekly story time at the library and she played with scarves and ribbon as music was playing and in between listened to books being read.

So our daughter really loves bubbles and likes to say "bubbles" alot!  So on deciding on a birthday cake to make for her, I thought of a fish cake after my 11 year old daughter found this one on Pinterest.  What did I ever do without Pinterest? :)  If you follow the Pinterest link you reach this blog tutorial on how to make the cake.  I thought it was a good one to tie in with the bubble "theme" since I thought I could make the fish blowing bubbles.

I made homemade chocolate cupcakes using the recipe on the back of the Hershey's Unsweetened Cocoa can.  It is the best chocolate cake/cupcake recipe and I've made it for several other cakes! For the head and tail I took the advice of the tutorial and made separate cake boards by tracing the shape of the head and tail onto cardboard pieces. I cut out the shapes and then wrapped each board with foil. This made it so much easier to decorate because I could move the individual head and tail cakes to ice them.  The icing is homemade cream cheese icing that I have used on many of the cakes I've made in the past.  I tinted 3 batches of the icing with yellow, pink and green food dye.

And here's the fish cupcake cake complete with bubbles streaming out of its mouth.  The tutorial suggested making a pink mouth with pink fondant.  I didn't want to buy fondant for such a little piece so instead, for the mouth, I just cut a piece of cardboard in a heart shape and taped a toothpick to the pointed end of the heart.  I stuck the heart toothpick in the cake and then iced the heart-shaped cardboard with the pink cream cheese icing.  The eye is made with white heart-shaped candies and a blue candy ball.

I found a great battery operated bubble blower at Wal-Mart similar to this one that entertained our guests, young and old, for a little while as we waited for guests to arrive.

I just love these photos I snapped of my daughter mesmerized by the bubbles, don't you?

After we ate snacks of goldfish crackers, pretzel sticks, and fruit we sang "Happy Birthday" and ate the yummy cake before we headed out to the sun, surf and sand.  It was a great beach day as my older children and their friends and my husband and another Dad caught some great waves on their boards and the Dads did some body surfing! 

It was another fun birthday and great memories were made celebrating the life of our sweet Cupcake #5!