This post contains affiliate links.

Last weekend we celebrated my daughter's 9th birthday. (Her birthday is Nov. 19, but we had to celebrate early due to our family's schedule).

My daughter wanted an "Adventure Time" theme, but since I've never seen this cartoon that is on Cartoon Network, she helped out a lot in planning for the party!   We don't have Cartoon Network at home, but she saw the show at a hotel.

My daughter found a Pinata cake on Pinterest and she said that was what she wanted for her cake.  It was the first I've heard of this rather easy, but fun and festive cake.  So I went for it and it was a smashing success!

I used an easy homemade funfetti cake recipe that I've used before for other birthday cakes.  I found the delicious funfetti recipe HERE. (It tastes so much better than the box kind, but the box version would work and save time)  I quadrupled the recipe because one recipe makes one 9 in. round pan cake.
After making the 4 round cakes, I cut holes out of the middle of 2 of them.

Then you stack the layers, putting the 2 layers with holes in them in the middle between the bottom and top layer. Fill your cake with your favorite treats before stacking on the top layer.  I filled our pinata cake with colorful Sixlets candies and some mini M&Ms.

The birthday girl and one of her older sisters enjoyed icing the cake and decorating it.  I found the "Adventure Time" cake decorations on Amazon.

After everyone grabbed some treats on the ground we went inside for cake and opened gifts.


My daughter was so excited to show her friends the surprise in the cake! 

Everyone had fun watching the candies fall out of the cake after it was cut!

Each guest received a goodie bag filled with an plastic Emoji cup and marshmallows on a decorative paper straw.  I used an edible ink marker to try to draw "Finn" on the marshmallows. 


It was a fun party and many special memories were made.  My daughter and friends loved all the activities and the best part was seeing the big smile on her face during the party and when she told me "Thanks Mom, that was fun, especially the scavenger hunt!"

 

This post contains affiliate links. 

Tomorrow, July 30, our youngest will turn 3 years old!  (Her annual birthday tribute post will be my next blog post.)  Today we celebrated our sweet girl with a Princess Party theme!  I've made princess themed cakes before, but this was the first year I decided to try a princess themed cupcake cake!

After my 12 year old daughter searched Pinterest for me for princess cake ideas, she found this one to use as our guide.


So we got to work and it was so fun to work with a few of my daughters on this cake!
First some Before and After photos, then some details...


Now a few "behind the scene" details...
I had a leftover pizza box top that I first covered in aluminum foil and placed the homemade Hershey cupcakes on the board to make sure they fit.  The chocolate cake recipe on the back of the Hershey's cocoa container is a family favorite and very easy to make!  I've used the recipe for several cakes in the past.

After I covered the box top in aluminum foil I thought it needed some more princess "fanciness" so my very crafty neighbor happened to have some silvery glitter wrapping paper in her craft room.  Perfect! So I wrapped the pizza box with the shiny glitter paper.


Then it was time to decorate with my helpers.  To make the flower-like cupcakes I first made homemade cream cheese icing that we love and put in several drops of pink food coloring to tint it.  Then we dropped the icing into Cake Mate plastic decorating bags and used the Cake Mate decorating tip that made the icing look like a flower when you swirled it around.   As my 12 year old pointed out, we had to fill in the gaps between each cupcake so we just made wider swirls for each cupcake to make them look connected.

Here is the finished princess cupcake cake complete with purple ribbon that I laid on top of 2 cupcakes that I got from that crafty neighbor of mine and we decorated the dress with white/purple Celebration Sixlets.  I also bought the purple tiara and wand from the $1 store and my 12 year old daughter hot glued the silver decorative string around the star on the wand. (The icing looks like a different color in each of the photos below, but they aren't.  The photo on my left was taken with my not so good smartphone and the one on the right was taken with our good Canon.)

We had "Wand"-erful Watermelon, Castle Cantelope, Prince Pretzels, Princess Popcorn, and Fancy Fish. I made the signs very quickly by just finding free images on my computer and pasting them into a word document.  Then glued the images onto card stock and wrote the names of each food.  Very easy and quick to do!

We had kids of all ages at the party so everyone mostly just played with activities that I set out.  We had dress up clothes available, bubbles, small kiddie pool, and chalk art.  We didn't get to alot of the activities that I had planned (like find the treasures in the sand box) because everyone was running around having fun and trying to stay cool on the hot afternoon.


Princesses love to party and change into several different outfits throughout the day.  It takes alot of energy to be a princess and sometimes princesses tucker out and need their beauty rest...


Sweet dreams little princess.  We had so much fun celebrating your special 3rd birthday with you!  We love you so much!

I've been making this fun cake for several years now and I'll be heading to the store for the ingredients to make it again this year! 

I posted these pictures and recipe a few years ago just before the 4th of July so I thought I would share it again in case anyone is looking for a festive and delicious patriotic dessert for this year's July 4th celebrations.  I think I will be making this dessert again this year as we have plans to spend time with family and friends for a cookout. 

My mom passed on the recipe to me and it's as delicious as it is festive for any 4th of July gathering!

Ingredients:

• 1 box of white cake mix (I used a box of Duncan Hines white cake mix in these pictures, but I've been baking cakes from scratch for awhile now so I think I'll use this homemade white cake recipe HERE.

•  3 oz. package of Raspberry Jello

• 3 oz. package of Berry Blue Jello

• 8 oz. thawed Cool-Whip

Directions:

•  Prepare cake mix as directed.  Pour batter into two 8 or 9 in. round cake pans.
• Bake as directed on box.  Cool 10 minutes while still in pans.  Remove cakes from pans and cool completely.

• Place 2 cakes back in their pans, with their tops up
• Prick each cake with utility fork at about 1/2 in. intervals 

• Mix 1 cup boiling water with Raspberry Jello package; stir to dissolve 
• Spoon Raspberry Jello over 1 cake layer making sure to spoon watery mixture over the pricked holes.
• Repeat with the Berry Blue Jello and spoon Jello over other cake layer.  I used almost all of the Jello mixtures when I spooned/poured it over each layer.  

• Refrigerate cakes for about 3 hours.
• Dip each cake pan into warm water to loosen the cakes, then remove each cake from their pan.

• Spread the red layer with Cool Whip topping

• Put the blue layer on top of red layer and frost cakes with remaining Cool Whip
• Refrigerate until ready to serve

You can then decorate the cake any way you want.  Since I was bringing this to a 4th of July gathering I made this design with strawberries and blueberries:


And the inside looks like this:



So if you need a great festive cake for this 4th of July, give this one a try!  It's always a hit with family and friends!

This post contains affiliate links.

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!