‘When Alice had sipped from the Drink Me potion, she ate a cake with currants spelling “Eat Me”.’
– Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
We have a number of family traditions, most of which came about entirely by accident… The Beaumont family birthday cake tradition is a very good example of this!
Back when we just had a couple of children, I pretty much just bought their birthday cakes from the supermarket.
But then one year, I decided to make all of their cakes. It was 2017, so it wasn’t too bad, I only had four cakes to make that year.
But since then, I now make all the children’s birthday cakes! 😱 That’s seven cakes a year! The special, mama-made birthday cake has taken on huge significance for them all, they don’t feel like it’s really their birthday without their homemade birthday cake! 🤦🏻♀️
So each March, as we get ready for the first Beaumont birthday of the year, I mentally chalk up the number 7, and then count down through each cake as I complete each one. There are 3 birthday’s within a four week period in May/June, so that’s always a particularly tiring time!
With me beginning this year not feeling my best, I thought maybe I could convince everyone that we took the year off from the cake tradition… But in mid-March, I was talking to Drake ahead of his 4th birthday asking what he was looking forward to, obviously thinking he would say the presents. But no, ‘my cake’ he said ‘this year it will be an UmiZoomi cake with Millie, Geo and Bot!’ So there was no getting out of it, as I couldn’t break his little heart!
So since 2017, I’ve made quite a lot of birthday cakes! It’s definitely a case of effort over talent – I’m not a natural at it, don’t have all the right tools and would really benefit from actually learning some of the proper techniques! But the children don’t notice any of that.
So, in no particular order, these are some of my favourite birthday cakes, from over the years👇🏼
For Iris’ 5th Birthday she had requested an Octonauts Cake. Everything was edible with the exception of Captain Barnacles! Poor Iris had chicken pox at the time, she was so itchy & miserable!For Oren’s 14th Birthday, he had requested a Hobbit cake. I’m not a hobbit fan, so I had to do a fair bit of Googling to work out an idea!Willow’s 11th Birthday during lockdown. Willow is the one who often just asks for a surprise cake, which is fun as I get to think up what I’d like to do and try things I’ve seen! This cake also had real ice cream in the centre.Drake’s most favourite thing ever in the lead up to his 2nd Birthday was Hey Duggee, so his cake had to be that! I was pretty pleased with this one! For Brock’s 4th birthday, he very specifically requested a ‘Jay from Ninjago cake, with a blue brain!’ So I first of all googled who Jay was 🤣 and made sure I coloured the sponge blue too.Heath turned 1. I always make the same cake for the children’s first birthdays – a HUGE number 1 cake! This cake feeds everyone for a week at least! For Iris’ 4th birthday, she specifically requested a unicorn cake with a rainbow mane, pink horn and blue eyes. She knows what she likes!For Oren’s 11th Birthday, he requested a Minecraft cake. This was much trickier than I thought it would be, and doing the little squares took hours! If I were to make this again, I’d probably give myself most of a whole day to do the squares for a much neater finish.Willow let me make her another surprise cake for her 9th birthday. Everything on this cake was edible – fondant mermaid scales, meringue waves plus candy seashells, mermaid tail & gravel. For Brock’s 8th Birthday, he requested a Squirtle cake. Squirtle is a Pokémon character, so once again I had to consult google to work out what it was meant to look like!For Heath’s 7th birthday, it just had to be a Super Mario cake, as he was such a fan!When Iris turned 2. This one was simple but I really loved it as Iris was very much into playing ball games at the time, hence her dress!For Orens 10th birthday, he asked for a Jellybeans cake, so I decided to try something new & make my first anti-gravity cake. For Willow’s 12th birthday, I made a tree stump with dark chocolate shards as bark, meringue mushrooms and almond pine cones. The pine cones took SO long to make! Inside, instead of sponge, it was layers of different flavoured cookie dough. By the time he was 3 years old, Drake was just obsessed with Blippi, so it had to be a Blippi cake! I was pleased with this one, even with its imperfections because I had Covid at the time and felt pretty rotten!Heath was obsessed with Power Rangers when he was 3y, so there was only one cake I could make for him! He didn’t like having his photo taken at that age though, but the others were happy to pose 🤣For Oren’s 9th birthday I made a (huge) Pikachu cake. This was one of the first character cakes I made, so I went for individually piping the yellow base colour rather than covering in icing.
And in case you were wondering, I did make Drake his UmiZoomi cake…
Of course this now means I’m committed to making everyone cakes again this year! 🤦🏻♀️
MamaBeau 