Savannah's birthday party #2

Sunday evening we had Savannah's family party. Yes, I know I'm really late blogging this. It was really fun other than the cake fiasco. Savannah requested a tall cake. So being me, and slightly prone to overdoing things, I thought I would do a three tier cake with each tier being two layers, with fondant icing and polka dots. I've never worked for fondant before because I hate the taste, but a friend of mine recommended a recipe for homemade marshmallow fondant, and I thought I'd give it a try. I thought I should probably make a trial cake, but I'm on a diet and didn't want all that cake sitting around the house, so I didn't. Well, I spent five hours on Friday baking cakes and freezing them. As I was baking I thought, "Hey, I can't have a three layer cake for a fourth birthday. I need to add a fourth layer." So, being me, I did. All the cakes were baked and looked delicious, and I finally made it to bed at three a.m. Saturday morning I woke up and started on the fondant. Now the recipe was not difficult by any means, but it took me much longer than I expected, involved a lot of elbow grease, and made a HUGE mess. Like half my kitchen was covered in powdered sugar and Crisco. It was not a pretty picture, especially since I was trying to do this and take care of my kids at the same time. It took me about three hours to make the fondant. That night when I finally got my kids to sleep at about ten o'clock, I started making the buttercream icing and decorating the cake. It wasn't as bad as I thought. This phase only took about three and a half hours. I got the colors perfect, exactly how I had imagined! Actually putting the fondant on the cake was a bit harder than I expected, but there was definite improvement, in fact the top two layers were almost perfect. I finally finished around 1:30 a.m., and had the fore-sight to take a few pictures before bed. I was so proud of myself! The cake was leaning a bit, but I had followed the online instructions and used wooden skewers to hold it together, so I wasn't too worried.





Well, I woke up in the morning, and the weight of the cake had made the bottom layer collapse on the back side. The top three layers were leaning against the wall and pretty smashed. It took everything I had not to cry. We went to church, and when we got home I decided to sacrifice the bottom layer, and have a three layer cake with a smashed side. It didn't look too bad. Not quite the edible masterpiece I had spent over eleven hours on, but not a complete disaster either.

So, her party was at five. We started out with pizza, salad and garlic bread. Then we sang happy birthday and served the cake and ice cream. It actually tasted pretty good, even the fondant! Then we opened gifts, she was very spoiled! Then came her favorite part... the pinata! I had forgotten a blindfold, but Jesse's sister had made her a gorgeous scarf, so we used that. She took one swing, missed the pinata and took the blindfold off for a few more swings. Then it was the babies turn. Tanner went first and had a huge grin on his face. Then it was Bridger's turn. He took like two swings before Lincoln decided that he wasn't going to miss out on the action any longer. He grabbed a second bat and started swinging too. We, being very safety conscious, responsible adults, let the two one-year-olds swing bats simultaneously while standing right next to each other. My some miracle no one was hurt. Than it was time for the seven-year-olds, Tommy and Cye. Cye went first, being 3 months younger. He missed a lot, but after one good swing the pinata was pretty damaged and we made him stop. Tommy broke it on his first good swing. It was mass pandemonium as all the kids rushed the candy. I may have possibly put in too much as they each got a grocery bag full, but they were happy. Then that was it! It was a great party!