Friday, January 29, 2010

Baby’s First Birthday Cake featuring a Rocket with Baby Photo and Small Smash Cake

This is a picture of the first birthday cake and smash cake we made for our son.

Type of Cakes
The big sheet cake was half chocolate and half yellow with a marble swirl down the middle. Even though we prefer to make everything from scratch to avoid preservatives and unnatural ingredients, we used box mixes to make this cake so it was easy and convenient, but we did make homemade buttercream frosting to top and decorate the cake. The small round smash cake for our son was made of a homemade carrot cake with cream cheese frosting…so yummy!

How to Choose a Theme
Choosing a theme is easier if your child is able to tell you what they want, but for a baby think about their favorite things (perhaps a favorite toy). You can also peruse baby's 1st birthday décor and try to get ideas from the plates or party themes. At first, I had a hard time trying to decide on a design for our sons first birthday cake, but the more I thought about it I knew it had to be rockets.

My son’s birthday was 10-09-08, so rockets were the perfect theme for his first birthday! We also called him “Rocket Boy” when he was an itty bitty, because he loved when we would gently bounce him on a knee and countdown from 10 – 1 and then lift him up in the air as we said blastoff.

Personalize the Cake
To make his cake even more personal and special, we added a picture of him on the cake! This was a new idea I had as I was working on the cake design. What I love about adding a picture is even though the cake is long gone I still have the picture to save as a keepsake in his baby album. To protect the picture, I used these great laminating sheets that I’ve been using in a lot of craft projects lately.

Tradition
My mom (aka grandma) always makes everyone a special birthday cake each year. To keep it affordable and special, she would always create whatever theme or design we dreamed up, but create the design on a standard cake pan so she didn’t have to spend a fortune buying special cake pans for each person each year. The special cake pans are great, but they take up a lot of storage space and often have only one use.

Mom informed me that she’s passing the torch to me to continue to make custom birthday cakes for my kids and I’m happy to take on the task. It really does make for a special and fun birthday when you have your very own custom birthday cake!

I’ll post a tutorial on how to make your own custom cake in any design soon.

Related Posts:
Train Birthday Cake – Choo-Choo Train Cake or Should I say Two Two Train!
Princess Castle Birthday Cake with a Small Princess Cake


This post is linked to: Ultimate Recipe Swap Thursdays at LifeAsMom.com - Birthday Cake Round-Up

No comments:

Post a Comment