Sweet Things in May

May is such a sweet month with all the flowers and birds and sunshine (or rain, if you're us). We also had some notable desserts in May.

First up was the Mother's Day delightful banana pudding. My son checked out a Good Eats cookbook (by Alton Brown) at the library. I told both him and his brother that they could pick out something to make from it. The eldest wanted to make banana pudding (the hot kind) for Mother's Day. This dish even had homemade vanilla wafers made with homemade vanilla sugar. It was yummy with a mountain of meringue.

My son's first (and perfect) meringue 

Other than the tornado warning, it was a delightful Mother's Day!

And what could be sweeter than a daughter's birthday? I suppose it was a daughter helping make her birthday cake. My oldest daughter wanted a sand castle birthday cake. She wanted it to have graham cracker crumb sand. The idea for this came from a Food Network show (Kids Baking Championship, I think). 

So we made a sand castle cake. This was an easy peasy one.

Sea stars

I made these stars by putting a little sugar on the counter and using a rolling pin to flatten some gummy candies. Then I cut out a star shape with a knife. It wasn't hard at all.

We used two circle cakes on top of a sheet cake. The sheet cake was frosted blue, and the layer cake was frosted in white. We then covered the blue with paper towels and went crazy with making a graham cracker crumb mess. I carefully removed the paper towels covered in crumbs, and the blue frosting was still sans crumbs.

Real seashells and making "waves"

Stars from the top

The flag was just a paper glued to a paper straw I had on hand

The birthday girl was very happy with her self-designed cake, and I was very happy to have had lots of help. Plus, it was an easy cake that needed no special equipment at all.

Coming soon: The June birthday cake (Don't miss this one! It has a tragic story.)