What? No Theme?

This year, Miranda wants a birthday party without a theme. She just wants to eat BBQ and have a slumber party with her friends. What? How am I supposed to plan for that? What kind of cake should I do? What color decorations should I use, for God sake?

So, having said that, here are pictures from her birthday last year. That birthday had a proper, if not original, theme... a Luau.

This is my sister about 3 months before she gave birth to her beautiful son. We've never been particularly shy about our bodies and given an opportunity to show off our bellies, especially when full of baby, both my sister and I will do it. One of these days I'll dig out and post pictures from a Luau we had for my cousin's birthday when I was pregnant with Joey. Sarong and bikini top for me too. And about 6 months pregnant as well. Weird. Some women crave strawberries when pregnant, we crave luaus I guess.



And here is the ice cream cake that Jeff and I made. We formed the cake in a Barbie cake pan using layers of frozen chopped raspberries and pineapple in between the sherbet layers. It worked beautifully and was super easy and yummy!

We made the lava by cooking sugar and water to the hard crack stage and then added food coloring.

Then we dripped it down on a silpat in the most lava-like shapes we could figure out. That was super fun and really not all that difficult. We also poured some of it down the sides of the greased empty cake mold, in order to give it the proper contours of the cake.



I suggest you click on the picture above to see how cool the lava on top looks.

I'm just sayin.

Here is a shot of what it looked like on the inside. At the last minute before putting it in the freezer I decided that it needed Skittles on the very bottom. I thought it would add more flavor, but all it really added were frozen, rock-like chunks that hurt your teeth when you bit into them. I suggest you skip those if you try to recreate this cake.