Birthday Cake Galore!!!

Yes, I LOVE to make birthday cakes for my kids.
But - I did not start out that way...
When Nico, our firstborn, turned one, I was planning on a simple cake decorated with M&M's, if that.
Close friends of ours were living with us at that time, and Robin did not let me get away with just a simple cake. She whipped up this really cool circus cake for Nico - and the rest is history.

This morning, I went through all of our digital pictures, trying to find the various cakes throughout the years. I think I found a picture of most of them.
SO MANY MEMORIES!!

The reason I'm posting them here is not to build a little shrine for myself, but to pass on ideas on how you can create your own birthday cakes geared towards your children. I'll try to explain a few things, so you can use these ideas. If you need more details regarding a certain design, just ask.

You will notice that I mostly use a round pan. I think it's so much easier to work with, the space is limited, and it looks fuller and "complete" much quicker.

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For Anya's first birthday I only made cupcakes (I think they were actually muffins) that I arranged on these styrofoam circles I found in the floral section of a craft store. Nico's truck cake was a simple box cake I squished in the back of on his toy trucks (lined it with foil first ;-)) ), and sprinkled it with crumbled up orio cookies.
I found that the table decorations are just as important as the cake itself. I usually find plenty of "artifacts" in their toy boxes to complement the theme they picked. No need to buy extras!

Just to "prove" that I don't always make fancy cakes :-)). Anya doesn't really care for cake much, so for her last birthday, we just had ice cream instead...

This was Nina's "first" birthday cake. I found a real Bamboo plant, the leaves in the front are just cut out of paper.

For Alex's fire fighter cake I cut a piece of black construction paper the width of the cake, and glued "flames" I cut out of tissue paper on the inside.

Nico built the bleachers for his football cake himself. Without it, the cake would be pretty blah. And then poor Elia got the lamest cake last year, as I could not come up with a good Scooby Doo idea. So - store bought decorations they were :-((. Not that I have anything against store bought decos, it's just not what I usually work with...

For Anya's tea party cake I used instructions that I could probably scan in and email to you if you would like them!

I don't know how many train and construction birthdays we have had, but this was one of them ;-)
Elia's Bob the Builder cake . Again, I dug through our Duplo box, and came up with plenty of decorations. Some sprinkles, a fence made with pretzel sticks, and that was it.
Building the the little train car from Thomas the Tank Engine was actually much harder than baking the cake :-)
I used a bundt pan for the ducky cake. After baking and BEFORE frosting, I lined it with foil and plastic wrap, and poured blue Jello in it. Once the Jello had set, I frosted and decorated it. All the little duckies are stickers.
For the race track I used different color frosting, and again, cars from our collection of match box cars.
The skateboard for Nico was featured in the "Family Fun" magazine. Their website has lots of cake decorating ideas! The swamp cake for Elia was somewhat similar to the ducky cake above. I used green Jello instead, and tried to make it look as gross as possible. The cake on the bottom right was very simple, but it looked just like the field you had to plant in Alex's computer game "Alex builds his farm" ( a Playmobil game which the kids loved!) Again, without the rest of the table decoration, the cake itself would be quite plain.
A couple of Anya's cakes. For the Dora cake I - once again - cut a piece of construction paper to fit around the cake. That is something so easy, yet very effective and dominant.
Yep, I know, this one is funny, but I just had to throw this picture in there. The little brother of one of Nico's guests wanted to stay at the party too - until he saw us *LOL*. Lots of frosting and 2 separate cakes baked in a glass bowl and frosted together were the basis for the planet Saturn. Elia's first birthday cake followed the same "cut out a construction paper 'skirt' " principle. For the Pilchard cake (from Bob the Builder) I simply enlarged a picture of Pilchard, my niece Dina colored it, and that was it. A few blue accents (candy and sprinkles) completed the cake.
When Anya was two, she really liked cows. The fence is made out of pretzel sticks, and the cows are our Duplo cows. I found the bandanna at the dollar store.
Nico's train cake was a lot like Alex's above. They didn't care :-)), and loved to play with the train right there on the table.
I guess, to keep all the cakes together, I might as well add the most recent ones, that I have posted before. The top two are the ones that Anja made.

I realized that I forgot to upload Nico's Veggie Tales Cake for his 2nd birthday. I even wrapped the presents "in the theme" :-))
Again, I just want to pass on ideas here - feel free to use any of them, or email me if you have more questions. I will disable comments for this post, because I'm really, really not on a self-glorifying kick here.

Love you all!