April 19, 2013

Birthday cakes

In an earlier post, I discussed the history of birthday parties, and included a description of the history of birthday cakes. I am certainly glad the ancient Greeks brought cakes with candles to Artemis's temple, and that the Germans gave children sweetened dough in the shape of baby Jesus on their birthdays. Birthdays would not be the same without birthday cake. I am lucky enough to have two birthday cakes in one week - one at the big Fourth of July family party (I mentioned this in an earlier post) and another on my real birthday three days later. My cake on my real birthday is always a star shape, but I have had many different cakes at the family party.

Here are some examples:

Three days before my 6th birthday, I blew out the candles of a cake that looked like my favorite stuffed dog, Taffy.

My family party 8th birthday cake was supposed to look like my cat, Beauty.
 It's too bad that I couldn't find a picture of my 9th family birthday party cake, which looked like a castle.

Three days before my 10th birthday, I had a rabbit cake.
I'm blowing out the candles on my butterfly cake three days before my 11th birthday.
A recipe for my 13th birthday family party cake, which looks like the sky on the outside and a rainbow on the inside, can be found at tasteofhome.com, although it is originally from American Girl magazine. I liked this one so much I had it several years in a row.
Three days before my 16th birthday, I blew out the candles on a cake decorated to look like fireworks.
My cake on my real birthday is always a star shape, but that has been decorated differently over the years. Some of my favorites include:

On my 6th birthday I still believed that my birthday had something to do with the celebration of America's independence just because they occurred during the same week, and my cake was decorated with patriotic sprinkles and flags.
My 9th birthday cake was the last one with flags. By then I opted for pink-white-and-blue rather than traditional 4th of July colors.
My overly sprinkle-laden 10th birthday cake and ocean-themed 11th birthday cake can be seen in an earlier post. 

I wrote my name and my cat's name and something else intelligible in icing on my 13th birthday cake . . . don't ask.
My 15th birthday cake was decorated with sprinkles in several shades of my favorite color, purple.
I couldn't find a close up picture of my zebra-striped 16th birthday cake.
My plain purple 17th birthday cake can be seen in my first post.

Two years ago, I took a cake decorating class and discovered many cake ideas. One friend made a three-layer cake with a rat on top (the rat is our high school mascot.) My favorite cake was the Teddy Graham pool party cake (the pool was made out of blue jello.) There was also a cake decorated with white fondant and black fondant dots. A great list of birthday cake ideas can be found at parenting.com.

Half birthday shoutouts to Aunt Leann, Jake, and Stefanie

2 comments:

  1. this is so lovely... how could you manage to keep all these picts?

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  2. Nice trip down Memory Lane! It was fun to make those cakes.

    ReplyDelete