Birthday Part 2: Cakes

We might have gone a bit overboard with desserts surrounding this most recent birthday.  But with my Mom in town, we had so many cute and yummy ideas that we had a hard time limiting ourselves!  We narrowed it down to three desserts- cupcakes for school, chocolate shortcakes with strawberries for the family party, and a construction cake for his party with friends.  They were all a hit!!

We put these cute little faces together using nilla wafers, cheerios and a pre-made tube of red gel icing the night before and I think only one got eaten for breakfast!

A few weeks ago they started digging up the streets around our house to redo some sewer lines.  As a result our neighborhood is a little like toddler-boy construction heaven.  During the day (including Saturday) at least one bulldozer or dump truck drives past our front yard every 10 minutes and we can see 3 excavators from our front door.  Not surprisingly, our little man has caught the construction bug- so we decided to go with it for his birthday theme.  From new toys:

To the cake:

 My Mom and I had a lot of fun making this one.  We made a 9x13 cake and used chocolate icing. We scooped out one corner of the cake for the excavator's hole and pressed Oreo crumbs onto the slope:

 We took the scooped out cake pieces, along with some icing and more Oreo crumbs and made a pile for the bulldozer to be scooping up:

And we mixed Oreo crumbs and Nilla Wafer crumbs 50/50 to make some gravel for the dump-truck to be dumping (and some coconut tinted with green food color for some grassy contrast):

I was really pleased with how it turned out!  I think next-time I would have made the chocolate icing a bit lighter so that the Oreo crumbs would have had more contrast.  But it was a hit!  And  hard to wait until the party to dig in!