Birthdays / DIY / Sweet

A Fancy $19 Cake

img_8352-1In case you couldn’t tell from yesterday’s post, I am pretty proud of the tiny smash cake that I made for P’s birthday.

I aspire to be one of those people who makes adorable confections with the perfectly piped icing and sweet, cakey layers. But… I hate cake. I love the idea of decorating a cake, but eating it? Ew. I’m just not into it.

So anyway, for Prim’s party I was totally torn about what to do for dessert. I knew we were going to have a pretty sizable crowd of people attending, so anything homemade would be a bit of an undertaking. I liked the idea of having a traditional birthday cake, but wasn’t feeling particularly motivated to tackle making it myself. I had toyed with the idea of a Costco cake, since those cakes are actually quite good (according to the people I know who like and eat cake) and are very affordable, but I was sort of turned off by the cake designs.

While I was hemming and hawing over what to do, it suddenly dawned on me — why didn’t I just order a plain Costco cake and decorate it myself? Genius!

img_8348-1So that’s what I did. I ordered a plain white cake from the Costco bakery, and did it up like so:

img_8350-1I had purchased that glittery “one” for P’s smash cake, but it ended up being too big for the tiny cake, so I repurposed it for the larger one and surrounded it with fresh peonies, gerbera daisies and babies breath.

I had searched high and low for those old-school sugar letters that every grocery store used to sell and apparently none of them carry them anymore! What happened to them? I was stressing over having to potentially hand-letter a happy birthday message when I came up with the perfect solution:

img_8294Trader Joe’s to the rescue! Thank god for those little cookies. They were the perfect size and totally fit with the theme of the cake. img_8349-1img_8351-1So that’s how I turned a $19 Costco cake into a treat fit for any party. I’d totally recommend this for any occasion. Honestly, the cake looked freaking wedding-worthy (I thought, anyway), and it was so fun to decorate.

I’ll definitely be repeating this craft for many birthdays and parties to come!

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