Wolverine bakes a cake

My best friend, D's brother got married a couple of weeks ago on D's birthday.  Congratulations, Johnny and Kristen!  I had the luck of getting to take the day off from work to watch D's little ones, Z and Lily.  You may remember Lily from this post on how to eat cake.  Being that I don't have kids and it has been eight years or so since I last babysat, I was nervous that the kids wouldn't think I was fun Aunt Jodi anymore unless I came up with cool things for the kids and I to do.  We played music and danced around (and learned that the only music Z and I have in common is Beyonce or Britney Spears), went for a pretty eventful walk to the corner, and made a completely awesome birthday cake for D while Lily was down for her nap.  Z and I had the. best. time.  

Z was happy to be my little photographer.  He took all of these pictures, except the ones he's actually in.  He did a great job.

Normally I like to bake from scratch, but this chocolate cake recipe is fabulous and great for short attention spans.  If you try this at home, use a fudgey chocolate cake mix.  It makes a difference and you will thank me later.  Yum!  It doesn't taste like a cake mix at all.

We made two 6 inch rounds and used the extra batter to make cupcakes for ourselves for dessert.

Then we made some pretty awesome buttercream icing that turns out a lot like italian buttercream, but is a LOT easier.  It uses this stuff:

Anyone else live on fluffernutters when they were little?  Z couldn't believe they made marshmallow cream, or that moms let their kids eat it.  Don't tell D, I didn't realize I was such a bad influence.

 We added the butter to the fluff with the mixer on, one tablespoon at a time.

Then we took a break to pose like Wolverine.

Then it was right back to business.

...Until Z caught me checking in with some of my co-workers.

Then we added the powder sugar.  Aren't these shots great?  Z could have run the camera during the cooking segments when I worked at WHTM.

Yeah, we made a little bit of a mess, but it was easy to clean up.

After the butter, we added fresh lemon juice to balance out all that sweet fluff.  Not too much to make it lemon buttercream, but just enough so it wasn't too sugary.

Z said that mine was the pink one and his was the blue one.  Gender bias!  But he's 5.  We'll let him slide.  The pink one was yummy.  I shared it with Lily.

Then we filled and stacked the cakes...  and when I say "we", I meant, "I".  The stacking and the crumb coat was kind of tough for little fingers, but my little photographer came through.

Z decided he wanted to make the cake look like this one, so while the crumb coat was in the fridge hardening up, we colored the top of our big-top tent.

Helen Norman for Country Living

Z designed the pattern:

And we took turns filling it in...  until Z thought it would be more fun to color my hand.

Then we cut it with safety scissors and formed it into a shallow cone shape.

Just then Lily woke up from her nap.  What timing!

And we danced around and sang to our favorite Beyonce and Britney Spears songs.  Z and Lily are great dancers and I was so excited to have other people join in my dance marathon.  Randy usually doesn't like to participate and the cats eye me warily.

Lily even smiles when I sing to her.  That is one strong girl!

We had dinner and went for a walk and only had a minor mishap when Z fell off his scooter and got a horrible life-threatening scratch on his knee that only felt better after we used Toy Story band-aids.  The regular ones weren't quite as effective.

My friend, Stefani, lives nearby and stopped over to help us finish the cake.  Z entertained her while I put Lily to bed.

Who needs fancy candy sticks when you have straws?

 Now by time we got to this point, it was after Z's bedtime, but I promised him he could stay up until the cake was done.  A promise is a promise!

Here's my little future cake decorator!

When I took Z up to bed, read him a story, and tucked him in, he reminded me to put the cake in the fridge so it didn't melt.

So cute, and D loved it.