Photo Perspective

Isn't he handsome? We've been having a really good day with V today. He's been so sweet - not at all self-centered like you'd imagine a kid to be on his birthday. He was thrilled with his technical drawing tools (compass, protractor, triangles), portable desk (basically a clipboard with a compartment to hold all his drawing stuff), and a book on how to draw race cars. Due to busy schedules, we'll be having the birthday supper tomorrow. His request was steak, salad with croutons, red beet eggs, and ice cream sandwiches for dessert. We'll be having the grandparents over for cake and ice cream on Sunday, so we kinda spread the birthday celebrations out over several days.

This post is WAY late, but I have a friend who needs to know how to make a Mater cake. I made this one in January for Meister's 6th birthday.

The bottom is two rectangle cakes stacked on top of each other. I raised it off the serving board with canning rings and a wax papper wrapped piece of cardboard. The shape of the hood and back is carved from the top layer. If you freeze the pieces for a few hours, they are easier to carve. The cab is a mini loaf pan sized cake placed upside down. Frosting is used for glue in between layers. After piecing it together, put a thin layer of frosting on it and return it to the freezer. This will seal in the crumbs for you.

For the final layer of frosting, the brown is chocolate frosting, the blue and green is tinted vanilla frosting messily spread over the chocolate. The white is just the plain vanilla frosting.

Chocolate covered donuts were used for the tires. Green gummy Life Savers for the eyes. Large pretzels, Oreos and string were for the towing mechanism. I cut a 6 out of construction paper to hang on string. The black for the bumper and the eyes was a tube of black frosting with the tips that you can get at most grocery stores. The tips screw onto the tube.


My extended family has found that they like the cakes better mostly frozen, so I leave them in the freezer until the party. They thaw an hour or so during the gifts before we cut into it.

I caught up on a few birthday layouts over the weekend.

Today was the baby's birthday. Last year, she was born in the truck on the way to the hospital on the evening of Mother's Day. Yesterday, she had her first cake, and seemed to enjoy it. Today Grandma Shirley was officially allowed to give her sweets. (We had forbidden it until she turned one) :-)

On Sunday afternoon we shared a Lightning McQueen cake with 13 guests. If you count the 7 that live here, that's 20 all jammed in one little house to celebrate the life of one little guy. If you'd like to see more pictures, please check in my photoblog. I've decided to switch to uploading my Project 365 pictures there so as not to clutter up this blog.

Today I'm decorating Meister's birthday cake for his party tomorrow afternoon. In preparation, I needed a picture of the Rust-eze logo from Pixar's Lightning McQueen. I took a picture of a small toy we have in the house and pulled it into Photoshop to delete the extras and fix up all the scratches.