Early Birthday Celebration

Let me ask you: when it's the birthday of someone in your household, how many cakes do you typically make? One? That does seem like the logical answer, yet I ended up making three this year and STILL didn't get one quite right! Way back when, I decided to make Eli a train cake, since he's obsessed with choo-choos. After all, I made him a frog cake last year on the first try with no pattern to follow or anything. If I could do that, this cake business can't be all that hard. Then I realized a train might be a little more difficult than the frog, and Eli seemed more interested in baseball anyway. GREAT! A baseball is easy...just a round cake, I thought. That was before I mentioned my idea to a friend of mine and she pulled out a 3-D cake mold so I could make a 'real' baseball for him. No problem; there were instructions inside. So last night I made the same cake mix from last year (low-sugar applesauce cake) and baked the night away. I measured exactly to the cake mold's instructions, but my cake came out not as round as it should have. Fear not! I bought a few boxed cake mixes just in case. After church this morning I got going on the next attempt. This time I tried to learn from what happened the first time around and apply it, so-as-to-not duplicate my smaller, less-round results. Of course, the opposite happened because I used two boxes and the molds overflowed. Not that big of a deal since I could have just cut off the extra cake. That was not the only problem though; the outside of the cake was hard and the inside was raw and liquid-y. Great. Now it is two hours before we're supposed to celebrate and no more than one before Eli will be up from his nap. Luckily I had not thrown out the applesauce cake yet, so I followed Lehr's advice and made two half-balls, in the spirit of the theme for the day: "2". Not quite what I'd hoped for, but a cake is a cake, right?

So, as the title indicates, we celebrated Eli's second birthday early this year. His real birthday is this upcoming Tuesday, but between Lehr working that day and our parenting class that night, it would be a rushed celebration, so we decided to have the 'party' today. Since time and energy are something I'm lacking these days, we did not have a full-out party yet again. Eli's godparents and Cooper and his parents came over, but that was about all I could plan for (since they all know to have low expectations where entertaining is concerned at my house). Eli and Cooper had a great time taking turns (or pushing each other off of) the new 'digger-scrapper' Eli received from David and Carolyn. Eli was not too keen on his cake this year; we're not sure if it was the singing or the candles or what. Despite that, he had a great time staring at the cake on his plate and saying, 'Ball!', but he didn't eat it.