The Water Park Cake

Guest post by my friend Annie

Over the years, I’ve made most of the birthday cakes for my four children. Even today as young adults they continue to enjoy the homemade cakes decorated by mom. The tradition for their 18th birthdays is they can choose their favorite cake from one of their previous birthdays to be recreated. My daughter, our youngest child, turned 18 in June and her favorite cake was the water park cake from her 8th birthday. My first thought when she made this request was “oh no, that was one of my worst decorating jobs” and since we were planning a combination 18th Birthday / Graduation party with 30+ people I was not too excited. My first response was to try to convince her to choose a different cake but this is the one my daughter really wanted so I set out to create a new and improved Water Park Cake.

I baked a 3 layered cake using one larger round pan and 2 smaller sized pans. Then I aligned the top two layers along one side of the bottom layer and frosted the whole cake with Cool Whip. Next I added the pool at the bottom of the slide which is cut from a Jello Jiggler made the night before. I added sand by crushing up graham crackers and then formed a slide out of a bar of Sparkle Cherry Laffy Taffy. I drew swimsuits on the Teddy Grahams with gel icing tubes and used Peach O’s for the inner tubes. Fruit roll ups were used to create the towels and graduation caps on each of the teddies. For the final touches, I added drink umbrellas, trees (drink stir rods I found at a local party store) and candles, “CONGRATS” on the 2nd layer for the graduation and “18” on the top for her birthday.

As stressed out as I felt about making this cake and embarrassing myself at this party; I was quite pleased with how well it turned out. If fact, it was a big hit with all our guests and more importantly the Birthday Girl.

What was your child’s favorite birthday cake that you made?

I'm linking this up over at Women Living Well, We areThat Family and Crystal & Comp