My sweet brother in law Adam has been planning a surprise 30th birthday party for my sister Heidi for a couple of months. I really wanted to make her birthday cake, THIS cake. I wanted to try out the vertical layer technique, and I LOVED the simple beauty of the roses, not to mention the idea of lots and lots of frosting (we are buttercream frosting people in our family). As I previously posted, I had a few issues the first time I practiced the vertical layer technique. After tweaking my recipes a bit, my second attempt, the cakes for the party, turned out GREAT! Thus the reason for my happy dance last week...
From the top...
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| From March 2011 |
From the side
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| From March 2011 |
Up close and personal with the frosting...
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| From March 2011 |
All 3 completed cakes...
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| From March 2011 |
I used the tutorials provided at the above link (and if you want to try out a lot of cool stuff, check out all her posts...I love her baking blog!). I also found it CRITICAL to use the simple syrup to bind your cake layers together. I had read that using simple syrup can make your cake soggy if you use too much, but I didn't use quite enough on the cake with the yellow outer ring...
(the carnage from transport)
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| From March 2011 |
2 of the 3 cakes stayed together pretty well, but with the trauma of getting there, and not using enough simple syrup between the layers...oh well. It still tasted DIVINE...and it made me feel good that all the brothers and sisters were sneaking tastes of the broken cake before the party started...
Back to the surprise party story...
Of course, I worked the weekend, and since Talia has dance on Mondays, it was a crazy day. I only got about 3 hours of sleep, and right as we started down to the party, it started snowing...heavily. By the time we got to Salt Lake, the roads were terrible, and we had driven our little Corolla because it gets better gas mileage. I actually felt very blessed that there were no major incidents on the way there...and that we got there and back safely.
The first part of the evening was a family dinner. We all arrived, and waited for the guest of honor...
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| From March 2011 |
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| From March 2011 |
My parents playing lookout...
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| From March 2011 |
(and a special thanks to Cannon...Adam's younger brother, who shoveled constantly for about an hour so that no footprints would be visible)
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| From March 2011 |
I didn't get a good picture of the "Surprise" moment...Heidi turned the wrong way. However, she was completely surprised, had not a clue about the party, so it was really fun.
My sweet nephew Logan...
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| From March 2011 |
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| From March 2011 |
Opening her present...
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| From March 2011 |
Adam had a really cool scrapbook made for Heidi...
After dinner, the second part of the surprise...Adam had invited a bunch of Heidi's friends to come celebrate!
Blowing out the candles
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| From March 2011 |
Me and my baby sister...
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| From March 2011 |
And of course, before I forget...the inside of the cakes...
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| From March 2011 |
It was a really fun party, and even though the weather could have cooperated a lot more than it did, I was really happy to get to celebrate with my sister. Happy Birthday Heidi!
