I love celebrating birthdays! It has always been fun to go all out one day a year for my kiddo. I love spending time planning birthday parties. I've mastered the food- going with a Nacho Bar, fruit and veggie trays pretty much guarantees that all the party guests will have something to choose from regardless of need or preference. (GF, Vegan, Paleo, etc)
This year my 5 year old wanted a Lego themed party. I was thrilled because I was intrigued by the Lego cakes I'd seen on Pinterest. There were many cakes that inspired me. Some were shaped like numbers, some were giant lego block, others were construction scenes. I read many tutorials and watch videos trying to perfect my approach to the lego cake. I loved every minute of it!
Z decided that he'd like to have a square lego construction cake with one tier being chocolate with cookies and cream filling and the other tier would be chocolate with mint chocolate chip filling. I use a fabulous chocolate cake recipe from Sweetapolita. I have yet to have it fail, in fact, I use many of her cake recipes and find them wonderful. You should check out her blog for sure. The filling/frosting was a Swiss Meringue Buttercream that I added crushed Oreo cookies to. To make the mint cookies and cream filling (it tastes EXACTLY like a Thin Mint cookie) I made Swiss Meringue Buttercream and added the Oreo cookies, peppermint extract, and green food coloring. It was amazing!
Making the individual lego blocks seemed daunting at first, but then I found a tutorial by Kathy over at Merriementdesign.com . She did a great job explaining how to use a baseplate as a texture roller to create the lego bricks. It was so slick and worked like a dream. The rest of the bricks on the side I used legos to measure the thickness and then cut varying lengths from a variety of colors. It looks complicated, but it went together easily.
Aside from the cake, I also made some decorations using Mega Blocks, poster board, plastic table clothes, construction paper, and crepe paper. Using the Mega Blocks, I made letters to spell out Z's name. Using the poster board, plastic table clothes, and construction paper, I made giant Lego bricks. It was far cheaper and easier to purchase the table clothes than primary colored wrapping paper. I used the crepe paper to jazz up our wooden banister and draw the primary colors together throughout the house.
I like to have a few organized activities for the littles to work on. This year, I had three stations for kiddos. The first was a decorate your own MiniFig station. The second was a Building Station where little built race cars. The third and last station was a racing station. I propped a board up and put a yoga mat over top to create a race track. The kiddos LOVED racing their newly built creations down the ramp.
Ever since the Lego Cake, my brain has been focused on all things cake! I'm currently working on a baby shower cake. Hopefully, I'll be ready to share a success story next week!
So long for now!
J
