5th Birthday Rainbow Friends Ice Cream Cake

A college buddy recently defined MAY as Most Activities of the Year. Oh is that true and I only have one (well, 2 if you count trying to keep up with my husband's schedule at 6 different campuses as well).  Between meetings for starting Kindergarten in August, end of this year's activities, field trips, Mother's Day and finally my son's birthday at the end of the month I am exhausted. As evidenced by the fact that his birthday cake was 2 days late and was store bought. In all fairness to me, my husband has been working the last two nights so today after school was the first chance the three of us have had time to celebrate together.

I had grand plans a few months ago of either a Daniel Tiger cake or a Cars cake. I was going to make my own ice cream cake (chocolate and vanilla). It ended up being a store bought ice cream cake - on sale, woohoo! At the store I planned to scrape off the blue decorations and redo it in chocolate and either put on a Daniel Tiger face or make a road for Lightening and Mater.

By the time I got home I decided the white frosting was fine and I'd just make some rainbow stripes with M&Ms and print pictures of some of his favorite characters, laminate them with packing tape and tape them on popsicle sticks (finger puppets!).

My solution sounded so simple, until the printer refused to cooperate and would not print Lightening, Mater and Super Mario.  After 10 minutes I gave up and rummaged through the toys on the floor, found the car gave it a bath and plopped it on the cake. I never did find the Mario figurine.

Quick photo shoot and I was DONE! Especially when I noticed the M&Ms were starting to sweat and bleed. sigh. I quickly shoved it back in the freezer and hoped for the best.

We presented it to him after school. His reaction was sheer joy.

A good lesson for me. I could have driven myself to exhaustion trying to make the "perfect cake". But he is 5 years old. It is a cake. It has a candle on it and some fun toys. He wouldn't have been any happier with something more elaborate. And now I have time and energy to play with him instead of worrying about a mess in the kitchen.

yeah, me.

Until next time, happy eating.