Austin's 24.5 Birthday

Half birthdays are a young Sirles family tradition. This year, for Austin's 24 1/2 birthday, two of his friends came over for homemade hot pockets and cake. Now theme cakes are most certainly a Lowe family tradition. Following in my mother's footsteps, I decided to get to work. This year I made a dinosaur theme cake. So fun, and altogether pretty easy!

First, I made two round chocolate cakes. The recipe will appear shortly on the "Cooking & Eating" page.

I frosted the first cake with some green cream cheese icing that was a total experiment with some cream cheese we'd been randomly given from another town. I covered the top of the cake and let the frosting hang down around the outside edges.

Then I chopped up the second round cake to get four small cirles, each one slightly smaller than the last. This was for the volcano.

I stacked those four circles and cut around them to even them out. The volcano look was a good thing and allowed me not to worry about any rough or uneven places.

Now I went into a number of toy stores looking for dinosaur figurines and could find none. The conversation usually went something like this (in Chinese, of course):

Shop worker: Miss, what age child are you shopping for?

Me: (Thinking to myself: There's no way I'm going to answer that question.) Um, I'm just looking for some small dinosaurs.

Shop worker: We don't have any.  [Kind of looks at me like I'm crazy.]

So I settled for these paper dinosaurs I had at home. Yes, I just happen to keep a collection of paper dinosaurs. I laminated their feet with scotch tape so they'd be re-usable, then I dug them in. I also placed some candy rocks from the local supermarket around the cake.

The last thing to do was to add some lava to that volcano. I made some vanilla pudding and dyed it red, then poured it down the side of the volcano.

And that was that. We had a great time. Austin loved it.