A Girl's Birthday

I've been quite lax about posting lately, but it's not because my blog inspiration well has run dry. Quite the opposite. Between two birthdays, a couple of family visits, Memorial Day fun, the dryer breaking twice, getting ready for guinea keets to be delivered this week, a high school reunion, a broken air conditioner, homeschool reviews and a few dozen other things, I think I have enough to blog about until Christmas. I'm not sure how many of these events will actually morph into posts, but there's one I don't want to miss.

My daughter's 5th birthday was a few weeks ago. We celebrated with both sets of grandparents and family friends. It wasn't much different than most of our other birthday celebrations. We keep them low-key-- a meal, a cake, presents, and shooing the kids outside to play if it's nice enough. I enjoyed the day immensely.

My favorite part came in the afternoon before the party. My daughter and I took a walk together around the yard to pick out pretty posies to put in a vase on the table. You see, my daughter loves, loves, loves flowers. As long as some weed flower is blooming outside, I am presented daily (at least) with surprise bouquets. So we walked around the yard and found beautiful and sweet birthday blossoms to arrange.

I don't really know much about arranging flowers, but we sure did have a lot of fun quality time trying to figure it out together.

Of course, the cake is an important part of a child's birthday party. The request this year was for a doll cake. I know I could have baked it in a bowl and wrapped one of her dolls in plastic and inserted it, but I splurged and bought the special cake pan with the doll pick. You know why? I always wanted a cake like that myself. And it seemed way easier.

Because my daughter's friend who was coming is sensitive to one of the red food dyes and because my daughter's order for a doll cake included a pink dress, I searched the internet for ways to naturally color cake frosting. I settled on strawberries for the pink, blueberries for the purple, and turmeric for the yellow.

 My first attempt at pink was way too light. I concentrated some more strawberry "dye" by boiling down some previously frozen and mashed up strawberries. I strained it a bit and cooled the syrupy juice. This made a darker shade of pink. I didn't have time to darken the blueberry dye, but I'll bet doing the same trick would work for that, too. The berry frosting had another plus--it tasted quite yummy. You might think the turmeric would taste off, but I didn't need to add much to get the yellow. The taste wasn't changed at all that I could notice.

There you have it: a completely amateur doll cake that I had fun making. Nobody complained about the taste, either. Most importantly, it was just what my daughter wanted. A happy birthday it truly was!