Sixteen Weeks and Counting!

Until Miss H's first birthday of course!

I love throwing my kids birthday parties. I have only thrown two so far I suppose, both for K, but I already know that I have a blast with it and am looking forward to H's first birthday party in September. I am super excited to have a summer birthday party because that means I can rent out a park pavilion. K's have to be indoors because early April is still on the chilly side here in Minnesota.

I called last week to reserve a pavilion and obnoxiously enough, H's birthday which is on a Saturday is taken. I thought I was getting ahead of myself and booking on the early side. . . I was wrong. I settled for Sunday of the same weekend. She won't know any different, and Sunday should be a great day for family and friends to celebrate my little girl turning 1.

Little Dude's 2 birthday parties have been a lot of fun. Since we are limited on space in our small house we have made his parties all afternoon/evening events. The kiddy party started around 3pm and then a second party for our adult friends around 6pm. Of course there is plenty of overlap between the two groups so it feels like one big long party. It works really well this way and K loves being the center of attention for the whole day.

Now I am looking forward to putting together lots of ideas. The first consideration is the cake.

For K's 1st birthday party I made him a monkey cake:

It was very cute, but too small for the number of people we had over.

K of course had a smash cake for himself. I used the photo of that to make his invitations for his second birthday party:

For his second birthday I wanted to make him an Elmo cake, but since I knew one wouldn't be big enough I made two:

I think that from here on out, I will either make one large tiered cake or a single cake with a bunch of coordinating cupcakes. Not that the twin Elmo cakes weren't fun.

I even made a cake for H's half birthday. . . well, half a cake that is:

Now I need to put together some ideas for a cake for H. Since the 1st and 2nd birthdays are the only ones where the birthday kid doesn't care about themes, I want to take advantage of that by skipping the cartoon character thing and just doing a color theme. I'm thinking peach and turquoise but I haven't committed to anything yet.

I love color, and I want to do an unexpected splash of color inside the cake like these inspirations I have found by searching different blogs:

Neapolitan 5-Layer cake from sweetapolita. The contrast inside this cake is awesome.

Vertical Layer Rose cake from i am baker. The vertical stripes are cool.

Colorful Easter Egg Layered cake from Picky-Palate. I love the colors in this one.

. . . and of course, the ubiquitous Rainbow cake, variations of which can be found all over the internet. This particular one is from none other than Martha Stewart's website. I made one of these for my dad a couple of years ago, it was pretty fun watching him cut into it!

OK one more, it's hard to stop. . .

A gorgeous Pink Rainbow cake from Call me cupcake! So simple yet so beautiful.

Enough of those for now. I am inspired though, I think I will do a relatively minimalist birthday cake with a colorful inside for H's party.

There are many other details that I have to plan out such as food, decorations, and invites; luckily I have some time still.