Five Years Old Today!

One of the highlights of my Durango trip was to be able to celebrate Landon's and Natalie's birthdays. Kristal had decided to combine their parties as a goodbye with their friends there . . . even though Natalie's birthday was still two weeks away.  And here it is ... today . . . the first day of April. The only joke about it is that mom and dad were expecting a boy.

Natalie had talked about making a cake together for quite some time already and could hardly wait to get started. We watched a Betty Crocker video for directions on how to make a princess castle cake. She caught on quickly . . . even though, at first, she brought out the sliced bread, thinking it was bread slices we were looking at.

We baked four square cakes. Then we layered three of them . . . and the last one we cut into quarters.

Three of those quarters were stacked on top of the other three cakes. The final piece was quartered again and two pieces landed at the top.
(The leftover pieces are good for taste testing.)
 Then came the only tricky part. The part they do not show you on the video. It calls for a crumb coating. That means to do an initial icing of the cake to cover all the crumbs and holes . . . sort of like filling and priming. It was quite wobbly and we put it in the freezer for a few hours after that was done.

After freezing it ... it was easy to do a final frosting on it and decorate it. I love the look on Natalie's face on this picture. It's like ... "can you believe this?" I cannot even explain how excited she was throughout the whole process. It was more fun than eating it ...



We set the table with our Disney theme. Chocolate Mickey Mouse cupcakes for Landon . . .

And the princess castle . . .

flagged by five candles, for Natalie.

Happy Birthday to our Sweetpea!

Love, Papa and Mimi