Alex's First Birthday!

I can't believe my little Alex is one! I can't believe a year ago, I had a little newborn, was sleep deprived and adjusting to two kids.

Well, we celebrated his party on Saturday. I've been looking forward to making his cake for a while. I decided on the pattern a few months ago. Here is the inspiration:

There were a few cake images I found, that helped me solidify the design. Thank goodness for the internet!

So here is Alex's cake!

This took me a long time to make, about three and a half hours. For most of it, I was watching three kids, so that may have hindered my time. But it was just time consuming, not very difficult.

I made the shapes a few days before, which was fine for the diamonds and circles, but not so much for the stripes. I had to make new ones for the white and blue because they would crack and break when I tried to bend them. Luckily, the yellow ones were fine.

I did have a problem when I started the second layer of the diamonds. They diamonds were not all the same, so some of the corners wouldn't match up. Plus, I was losing surface area with the curve of the cake, so they didn't match up because of that as well. I was just going to go with one row of diamonds, but Dan convinced me to just cut each diamond a little smaller and see if that would work. I'm glad he did and I'm glad I listened to him, because it really made the cake look better that way.

I was excited to a make a two tier cake. There were a few places where the base yellow fondant didn't quite work like I wanted it to, but those are just minor things.

I originally was going to put these letters on popsicle sticks and stick them on the top layer of the cake, but after three hours I was kind of done with the cake. I realized it was going to be really crowded on top and they weren't long enough to put on the bottom layer and stick out on top of the top layer (make sense?), so I just stuck them on the cupcakes.

In case you couldn't tell, the colors were yellow, white and blue. I did an initial themed party, with "A." I got the idea here, from the Martha Stewart website.

Party favors!

I made some popcorn and melted white chocolate and coated the popcorn with it and added mini M&M's. It was so good! And of course, I forgot to hand them out. Figures.

Water bottle labels.

Cute little name sign.

Thank goodness I have a cricut machine, otherwise I probably wouldn't have made all these decorations.

Hanging A's.

Dan was kind enough to hang these for me, while I was getting other stuff ready.

I started making the decor a few weeks before, in the evenings. Just doing a little at a time.

Our little family!

Alex getting ready to blow out his candle.

He was a little hesitant at first, not quite sure what I had put in front of him.

I ended up cutting a chunk of the cake off, and cutting it into little pieces.

Then he really dug into it.

Dirty cake hands!!!

Alex playing with some of his new toys.

Overall it was a fun party and I was very pleased with how the cake and decorations turned out. I think Alex had fun, even though he didn't know what was going on. He got some fun toys that he really likes (and Anna, I should add).

I'm off the hook until Dan's birthday. I told him to start thinking about what he wants and I'll make him a fun fondant cake!