Share Birthday

We decided to have one party for both girls this year, and the girls started calling it a "Share Birthday." They really latched onto the sharing idea in a way I hadn't anticipated. For all the effort of trying to teach them, beg them, force them to share... sometimes it just flows naturally - and isn't that beautiful? And maybe I should remember to stop lecturing and just spend more time baking with the kids, eh?

When we prepared the cakes, we baked  the batter in tuna cans, making two very small, very tall cakes. I thought this was a lot of fun, but I was also worried - how exactly do you slice and share a very skinny cake? My mom, my trusty baking guru who is always on the other end of the phone, suggested cutting each layer in half, height wise - making the layers shorter and making more layers. Enough so that each guest could have their own little cake.

I told the kids about this idea, and explained that they could pick what color layers each guest received - so it would be a little gift they gave their guests. They pretty much thought that idea was AWESOME, and immediately had me call everyone to find out what their favorite color was.

[A couple of side notes about the cake:
1.) Making the layers shorter also meant that the birthday girl cake layers were a little neater and straighter and made the cakes tidier all together. Nice.
2.) One cake mix made about 14 tuna can size cakes, which I cut in half, so we had 28 layers. Each birthday girl had 6 layers, and each of the 5 guest cakes had 3, except for Daddy who got an extra 4th layer. You could also make nine 3-layer cakes.
3.) Even the small 3 layer cakes were really too much for a guest to eat in one sitting - it would have been super cool to have a little take-out boxes for the guests to take their extra cake home. Alas, we kept the leftovers.]

After choosing the colors and arranging the layers, I finished icing the cakes on my own. But the girls wanted to do more. They wanted to make more surprises for their guests! As I was icing the cakes, I realized I was going to have trouble telling them apart - so I had the idea that the girls could make cake toppers. I drew a set of circles on cardstock and had them draw a picture of each guest (and themselves) in a circle. There was probably a neater way of assembling them than what we did - but with a little scotch tape, blue paper and some grilling skewers we ended up with these cute cake toppers.

Our guests were also super gracious when I required each of them, one by one, to carefully cut their cake in half and pose for a picture with their cake and cake topper. It was exciting for me and the girls to see them opened as well, since they were pretty messy looking pre-icing, and so lovely when cut neatly open. Each cake got some oohs and aahs.

The cake toppers made nice party favors for grandparents and aunts. I think they would be cute in a potted plant. I love the set of our family that each girl made, and will probably do something with those soon...

I had a lot of fun doing all of these things with the kids - baking and scheming, color matching and drawing.  It seems to be the best of parenting, the easiest and most fun part, and the part too easy to forget at times - the being together, sharing our days. This was so hard to grasp in the beginning, but its becoming clearer to me now. Here's to togetherness and the passing of time. Many years, my not-so-little ones!

Please, let me know if you have any cake questions. Although I wrote more about the cakes here and there are a million rainbow cake tutorials on the web. Much fun and great wow factor - I definitely recommend it!

Baking Together

We're getting ready for some birthday celebrating this weekend, so the girls and I baked their birthday cakes today. Usually, I like to make the cake a surprise, but this year the girls both wanted rainbow cakes, and since that wasn't a surprise I thought they'd like to play with the food coloring with me.

We'll celebrate both birthdays together this year, so we're making two cakes. L is having a true rainbow, and J chose a pink value scale. This was a fun follow up on the recent color wheel lesson we did. I think they'll both be beautiful!

We used one cake mix (yes, friends, a mix!) and baked 12 little cakes in washed tuna and pineapple cans. I put a 1/4 cup of batter in 12 little bowls and we added food coloring, then baked them 4 at a time (because we couldn't eat 12 cans of tuna on such short notice).

After baking, I sliced off the rounded tops with a bit of thread so they will stack more neatly, and the girls and I ate the little cut off pieces. I will decorate and assemble them later so that there is at least a little surprise - but I'm glad we did this part together.

The girls and I thought that even the mess we made was beautiful. It's nice to have something to celebrate when there has been so much sadness in the news and from friends lately. In the picture below they each just happen to be wearing their favorite colors, which nicely match the cakes we made. I can't believe how quickly they grow, and how precious and beautiful they are! 

We made the Solar System.

The girls and I took another stab at flour dough crafts this week with a solar system mobile. I found several nice pictures of the planets and their relative scale, thanks to google image search, and mixed up some dough. This was a fun project for too many reasons:
1. Because my kids love anything outer space-y
2. Because we all love to get our hands into something
3. Because, unlike last time we played with flour dough, this time I used food coloring to dye the dough, so there was no messy painting involved
4. Because, I didn't have to buy anything
5. Because, it combined arts, science and math
6. Because, its so pretty!

My flour dough recipe came from an 80's Childcraft (the Make and Do volume) with awesome illustrations. We baked the dough for about 2 hours at 250 degrees. You don't have to bake the dough, unless you want to speed the process, but the idea is to dry it out with out browning it - so don't set the oven any higher than 250.

The school-y part was talking about scale and colors. We mixed colors, learning how to mix green, gray, orange and brown. Plus, we talked about big and small and all the sizes in between. Ours aren't really to scale (especially the sun as you may notice) - we had a limited amount of dough and cookie cutter sizes, but the variation in sizes was on the right level for their age group.

We flattened the dough and cut circles from biscuit cutters, jar lids, chap stick caps, and pen caps - all providing various sizes of circles. We added distinguishing marks - the red spot for Jupiter, the rings for Saturn and Uranus, water and land for earth, tails on the comets. Once they were on the pan, I made a hole in each by wiggling a straight pin near the top. After they were baked, I used this hole to hang them like ornaments from a tension rod.

Our actual discussion of science was integrated into the making. We talked about how close a planet is to a sun affects how hot it is, how tiny the moon is compared to the other planets, how Earth is the only planet people can live on, etc, etc. They are really into space, so most of this is repeated facts they already know - but of course, little ones like this like repetition. 

Ready for the oven. We made a (not to scale) rocket ship from leftover dough.

Earth and her moon

Saturn - the ring wraps all the way around, of course.

Jupiter with her red spot.

We all loved the finished product, and I hope it hangs in their window for a long time to come. At least until their old enough to do another one. :)

Fiesta colors