Skateboard Birthday Cake

I am awful at making birthday cakes. Somehow, the art of making a traditional two-layer birthday cake seems to elude me. One year, I forgot to put icing between the layers (I think that was Aidan’s first birthday). Another time, the top layer slid off the bottom layer as the icing melted in the Texas heat. So I’m not sure why I volunteered to make the cake for Aidan and Grandpa’s joint birthday party!

Yesterday, I set out to bake the cake. I greased the pans well. And floured them. And yet the cakes would not come out of the pans!!!! One layer came out with just a little of the bottom missing, and the other layer came out in chunks. Thankfully, I have some great people following my facebook page, and ya’ll gave me some terrific ideas!

One suggestion was this website, and I found a skateboard cake. Perfect! Aidan was receiving a skateboard for his birthday! I ended up not using that particular skateboard cake, since it involved starting with a frozen pound cake. I googled “skateboard cake” and found that a lot of people made cakes with the skateboard upside down, and we decided to go with that!

To make the skateboard shape, I baked another cake, this time in a 9 x 13 pan. It popped right out of the pan, so I’m blaming my 8″ round pans for the original mess. I used that for the center, and cut away the sides a little to look like a skateboard. Then, I cut my one intact layer of the original cake in half to make the ends of the skateboard.

My husband graciously spent an hour icing and decorating the cake while I rushed to finish my preschool Sunday School lesson for the next morning! The lighting in this picture isn’t great (because it was 10:30 p.m.!), but the cake looked pretty good!

Right before the party, I added wheels to the skateboard. I used pretzel rods for the axles and cupcakes for the wheels. Another cake I saw had mini donuts for the wheels, and that looked even better, but since we had the cupcakes on hand, I decided to go with those.

We had one very happy birthday boy!

Aidan was SO happy to get his skateboard! We had been downplaying the excitement the past two weeks with a lot of “I don’t know if you’re old enough…” and “A skateboard is a big responsibility so we’re not sure…” We knew he would know what it was as soon as he saw the package, so instead of wrapping the skateboard, we wrapped the tool that we bought for adjusting the wheels along with a note saying “Not sure what this is for? Go look under your pillow.”

And there was the skateboard! Nothing like a good surprise.

And what does one do when one gets a new skateboard and it’s 105 degrees outside?

Practice inside, of course!

I am predicting more injuries in our future…

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