I have to admit that I wanted to go over-the-top, all-out, fantastic, Martha Stewart on Ryne's first birthday party! He only turns one once and I wanted this to be the coolest First birthday party ever! If my vision for the party had come to fruition it would have been amazing! I was totally envisioning something that you would find on Hostess with the Mostess, where everything was decorated so cute and everything coordinated, and it would look like a real professional party planner/decorator had designed this party.
Well, of course things go wrong...especially for me and especially with a one year old running around!
The theme (you HAVE to have a theme these days!) for Ryne's party was One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish because Ryne loves to swim, so we call him our "little fish" and he turned one (i.e. One Fish..)! My sister-in-law, Sarah designed some AMAZING invitations that looked like the cover of the book. You can check out some of her handiwork at Prints Charming Paper.
I made the smash cakes for the party. I called them both smash cakes because that's what the baby's cake is generally called because they just smash right into it, and the big cake that I made for everyone else ended up getting smashed as well. I made a white cake with yellow buttercream icing for Ryne, and the big cake was supposed to be a two-teired yellow, topsy turvy cake covered in fondant to fit in with the "Suess" theme and resemble the cover of the book. Well it was definitely topsy turvy! So topsy turvy it didn't pass the assembly inspection! This would have been a great cake to show on Cake Wrecks!
The idea behind a true topsy turvy cake is that the top layer of each tier is larger than the bottom layer and each tier appears to be sitting at an angle. It's basically a gravity-defying cake, but gravity conquered this topsy turvy cake. First off, I made each tier WAY to tall. That had a negative effect on the layers that were unfortunately less dense than the others (the bottom layers - oopse!). It was just too much weight on a the fluffy bottom layers. Add on the weight of the fondant and you have a disaster! Then I decided to cut off part of the bottom of the top tier before covering it with fondant to hopefully remedy the issue with that tier as well and that just messed things up worse. The top tier looked better and was much more stable than the bottom tier of doom, but I had already cut my hole in the bottom tier for the top tier to sit on, and after trimming the bottom of the top, the hole was too small. Confused yet? Anywho, basically the top tier was not sitting on the support structure, it was sitting on the edges of it's designated hole, and put too much pressure on the fondant on the bottom layer, so the fondant began to crack like crazy. It was a hot mess! [Speaking of hot messes, it was 98 in Knoxville today! Great day for a pool party with forty something people in our pool and club house, but I doubt the rest of the neighborhood thought so!]
Go here to see the step-by-step instructions that I used to make this yellow train wreck! I had even hand carved and hand painted the one fish, two fish, red fish and blue fish to put on the big cake, but they never made it on the cake because the cake was never assembled! I just cut and served the cake unstacked! Days and days (and I mean days) of hard work to go into that topsy turvy cake and I couldn't even stack it and it was literally falling apart! Oh well! I kept my cool, even though I was thoroughly disappointed and the perfectionist in my wanted to cry! It still tasted good, which matters most with cake!
Anyway, the rest of my vision for the party didn't quite come together either. I wanted a picture of Ryne at every month hung up around the club house, I wanted all kinds of cutesy, theme-related things all over. This was my inspiration, only all One Fish stuff and it just didn't come together like I thought. We were running down to the wire just getting things set up in the clubhouse, so you know no fancy frills made their way to the party!
I did carve a watermelon fish! It held the fruit! We served colored goldfish crackers in real fish bowl, and I made jello cups that looked like little fish bowls by putting a Swedish Fish into blue jello cups! And Ryne's smash cake was so cute that I actually started getting teary-eyed because it looked just how I wanted it to. That's what matters! It was Ryne's day and his cake was perfect! I think everyone had fun, even if the decorations were not quite what I had envisioned! I had One Fish goodybags...literally! I went to every Target in Knoxville, some branches even three time, just to get every child-safe One Fish item in the Dollar Spot that I could!
Next year, we are keeping it low-key, and the cake will be standard or cupcakes! Happy birthday to my little "one fish!"
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| Ryne's One Fish Smash Cake with hand-painted gumpaste one fish! |
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| Digging In! He was such a subdued first-time cake eater/smasher! |
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| Yummy! |
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| Watermelon Fish! |
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| Watermelon Fish Face! |
3 comments:
Wish we could have made it to the party. Can't believe Ryne is one! I'm sure everything looked great. Hope everybody gets more sleep this week. We're thinking of you!
i've been thinking of taking some baking classes, to refresh what my grandmother taught me, but i wanted to ask you how hard it is to make fondant? did you just figure it out by trial and error or did you take any classes?
Ashley - working with fondant is something that I'm still not great at. It's very temperature sensitive. I think it was too hot in the house on Saturday when I was trying to cover the cakes. So sometimes my fondant looks great, and other times it's a hot mess! I took classes at Michaels. A lady named Mari Mar teaches at the west Knoxville Michaels. She is a wonderful teacher.
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