Happy Birthday Niko Part 2

Before I show you Niko's party, I want to show you how I made his birthday cake! I'm usually pretty terrible at sculpting cakes (a ton of crumbs end up in the frosting and it's kind of terrible!) but this time it actually turned out pretty well!

First, I baked 3 round cakes and a pan of cupcakes. When they were cool, I stacked them and put a cupcake on the top, then used the width of the cupcake as my guide to cut the whole thing down to a cone shape.

When that was done, I frosted between the layers and covered the whole thing in a layer of frosting. 

Then I popped the whole thing in the fridge and made myself wait an hour or 2 for the frosting to get nice and chilled before putting on the next layer. (I was very worried that if I didn't wait long enough, I'd just end up with a second layer of frosting that was full of crumbs!) It turned out that was long enough, because the second layer went on almost without a hitch, and ended up pretty smooth and nice looking!

Finally, I mixed up some red and yellow frosting and used those and some chocolate chips to make the whole thing look more volcano-y. 

And that was it! 

I kept decorations pretty simple. One roll of streamers got cut up and strung from the ceiling to be dinosaur jungle vines, then Niko and I painted some pteranodons, which I cut out and strung from the ceiling as well. 

(It's really hard to see in the above picture, but there's probably 20-30 pteranodons flying around in there)

I made some loosely dino-themed snacks too. 

Above we have, from left to right:

-Swamp Jello

-Dinosaur bones (pretzel sticks)

-Tyrannosaurus Chex (muddy buddies)

-Dinosaur nest no-bake cookies 

(with peanut m&ms clustered in the middle as eggs)

-Herbivore munchies (veggies, dressing and hummus)

-Carnivore footprint cookies 

(sugar cookies with dino footprints stamped on them)

Almost all of Niko's little friends got to come, and they had an awesome time running around and generally being excitable little people :) 

After lots of playing, chatting and munching on snacks, we had some cake!

There was this really great parenting moment when we sang happy birthday and all of Niko's friends and their parents were singing happy birthday too--and in that moment I was sort of overwhelmed with how much I loved all of those friends in our livingroom, that came over to help us celebrate the birth of our little boy.  We know almost an absurd amount of really, really, really amazing people here in Ann Arbor (so many of whom weren't even there!!) and in that moment I just felt so blessed by their love for Nikolai and our family, and in general their abundance of kindness and goodness. Thanks everyone for being such wonderful friends, and for celebrating our Nikolai with us! We love you!