Gordos Birthday

For the first time ever we celebrated Jose's birthday. He's not big on doing that, hence the lack of celebrations. This time around, considering everything he'd gone through the past year, we decided to at least have family over. His brother, sister and cousin with their families came over and my family did too. We had an awesome time. Jose's brother-in-law (Jose's sisters husband) made chicharones, which were OMG good. I made some frijoles a la charra, Jose's sister made rice and we had some aguas frescas. The food was good.

We, of course, also had some desert. I made my Gordo a cake. I had been contemplating on what kind of cake I should make for him. All kinds of images came to mind, jailbird cake (yeah I know it's not funny but that's what came to my sarcastic mind), construction cake...but then it hit me..."I know! I'll make him a pool table cake!" He's really good and playing pool. I found out the hard way several years ago :) Well here is it. Not to toot my own horn but I'm kinda surprised at how well it turned out.

I made a cream cheese filling, it was really good. I don't like using frosting as a filing. I like using cream cheese or strawberry jelly or something else.

Transformers Cake!!!!

Cairo's birthday was earlier this week.  My chunka munka turned 6 and even though Jose is not here right now we tried to not bring the birthday boy down.  My brother in law offered to have a cook out for Cairo at his home and how could I say no?  I said sure, but I'm bringing the cake.  So I made Cairos birthday cake and here is how it went.

I didn't take pictures of the process of baking the cake because quite frankly I'm not that talented to bake a cake made from scratch.  I bought a couple boxes of Duncan Hines French Vanilla Cake Mix and just followed the instructions.

Here is the bottom layer of the cake with the well:

I filled the well with cream cheese frosting.  It's basically whipped cream cheese with sugar:

Added the top layer and ready to frost:

Finished frosting.  Normally I would be upset about the crumbs but since this cake is getting Transformed I didn't care all too much.  I think I need to find some other none stick spray or some other way of lining the pans.  I keep getting this thin cake skin that comes off and makes the cake crumbly when I frost it:

The last few times I've made cakes (I'll post pictures later) I've colored the frosting.  This time I left it white because I decided to try Duff's Cake Graffiti I used the blue and silver.  I really liked the silver, it's totally metallic, I want to make a car cake or something.  This is how it turned out:

I made some buildings out of the extra cake batter, I colored them a gray color.  They looked purple in the kitchen but when I brought them out into the sunlight they were really gray:

I figured the buildings needed some windows, doors and green foliage and I added the "Happy Birthday Cairo!".  I tried to make the letters look Transformery and they kinda grew as I wrote them but I'm ok with how they came out:

I made some blue frosting for the swirlys at the bottom:

Cairo wanted stars lining the top:

I bought some transformers to add as toppers and wah-lah!! :

We tore into that cake, you can kinda see the cream cheese filling:

Cairo seemed to have liked it very much, check out his new Mohawk hair cut:

I was really nervous about making this cake, but I'm really glad I did. Cairo really liked it.  The height of the cake prevented me from covering it while it was in the fridge. I thought the frosting was going to dry out and get hard but I was pleasantly surprised, it was soft and the cake was still moist also...double bonus!  Next time I will make a larger cake.  This cake was enough for 9 adults and 4 kids, I'm glad there was enough for every one, it was a pretty close call though.