Brody's Bday Cake

I don't know about all the other mom's out there, but as much as I want to make my kids' birthday's fun, it WEARS ME OUT!  I do Brody's bday and then turn around and about 3 weeks later have Ryder's to do, and I feel so overwhelmed.  Last year after the boys birthdays I decided that the next year would be different.  I wanted to take them out of town and buy store-made cakes.  I didn't want to do parties, make cakes, or have everyone around.  I just wanted it simple.....

Cut to this year.  Seriously lack of funds.  That means birthday parties and everything that comes with them.  Yay. (sarcasm at its best, my friends)

So, you would think that I would be smart enough to not ask my soon-to-be 4 year-old what kind of cake he wanted, right?  Well...wrong.  I asked.  What did my Brody boy request?  A dinosaur cake.  Oh, and not just any kind of dinosaur cake....a tricerotops cake.  Say what?  Yeah, that's right.  A triceretops cake.  I don't even know how to correctly spell it, let alone BAKE it.  You know, that might seem like a pretty normal request for a 4 year old, but my 4 year old doesn't even own a dinosaur toy!  Nor has he ever expressed interest in dinosaurs.  This came out of left field.  Seriously.

Well, the research was on.  Very few triceretop cakes were to be found and the ones I did find were either incredibly hard to do or incredibly ugly.  I finally found a pretty basic cake that I thought I could pull off, but it was a stegosaurus.  I showed it to Brody and he flat out turned me down on that idea.  Then he took a nap. He woke up telling us all he was going to have a purple stegosaurus bday cake.  Score!

The day before Brody's birthday, the cake making commenced.  It was quite the ordeal despite it being the "easy" choice of all the ones I thought I could do. 

Finally, I finished it.  It turned out pretty darn cute if I do say so myself.  I put the pan on the floor to take a picture of the finished masterpiece.  Brody was so excited and said he was going to be in the picture too.  Somehow, someway, as I was reaching for the phone to take a picture, he fell and SMASHED THE CAKE!  It was just the head, but you should have heard the yell come out of me!  "NOOOOO!!!! WHAT DID YOU DO?  I AM SO MAD!"  And poor Brod, he was just as sad as I was mad.  (If I hadn't been blinded by my madness, I would have taken some pictures of the massacre.)  It was an accident, and he didn't mean to do it.  I said maybe we should just throw it all away and have no cake.  Brody with quivering lips cried, "no mommy!"  He was SO sad.  I felt so horrible for being mad, but at the same time I just spent hours and in just seconds it was destroyed.  So disappointing.

There is a happy ending though.  You see, there were still a few scraps of the cake that I had cut the dinosaur form out of.  I was able to just finish fully decapitating the dino's head and piece together a new one.  Wouldn't you know, the second dinosaur head wasn't as cute as the first.  That's just how it goes, I guess.  Brody was just glad we could save his purple dinosaur, and I was too.  He ended up with a way cute cake that he absolutely loved and that is all that mattered.  After all, I don't go to all the trouble for me, its for him!