Last weekend little miss Avie turned the big TWO!
We had a dotted celebration with lots of friends and family.
Using this very helpful pin (thanks Cake Central!), we made a polka dot cake.
First, start with a cake mix and then using food dye, create your colors:
Next, fill your cake pop pan and bake:
The tutorial recommends underbaking them for a total of 13 minutes baking time. This worked for us… but we came up with a few helpful tips that my mom and I learned in the process.
To begin with… always beat the batter the full 2 minutes. Time it. Seriously. Or you will end up with these:
Theses cake balls did not rise. They kinda did and then, they fell. At first, we thought it was the underbaking. Then, we thought it was the flavor additives (creme bouquet and butter cream), but those really should not have affected the height. Finally, we realized that we hadn’t actually beat the batter long enough, we just guestimated. Don’t guestimate.
Another cake mix later, we had these:
So, we put these in the bottom of our cake pan, covered with white cake mix and…
Another helpful tip, put the balls on the bottom of the cake, or they might rise up and get cut off when leveling the cake (if you plan to level off the top). We even used the fallen in the bottom of the cupcakes by cutting off the flat tops so that we had half circles.
Then decorate. Helpful tip #3, be sure to have enough powdered sugar to make more butter cream than you think you’ll need. We had exactly enough with about 2 tablespoons left over. Kinda wish we would have had some to spare.
We also put 2 colors on the top layer and then 2 colors on the bottom layer, that way each piece would have all 4 colors to be sure that
I’m not going to lie, this turned out better than I expected. It wasn’t one of those pinterest fail kinda things. I was very happy!
Avie was very happy too!
Then we opened presents. She got some awesome gifts! Wooden fruit and sushi for Avie to “make dinner”, a ball pit, a vTech stencil drawing tablet (think etch-a-sketch), legos, markers and coloring books…
and then of course, from us, baby doll parafanelia.
Did our church has an awesome indoor playground? So that’s where we had it. And the kids loved it!
While there was quite a bit of planning, everything went great and we had a wonderful time! Thanks to all of your friends and family who helped us celebrate!