Well, I’m a little late. But better late then never.
Juliette’s 5th birthday was 2 weeks ago now, and today is actually Linus’ birthday. I have been a mom for 7 years.
Holy cow.
It seems like just yesterday we were meeting him for the first time.
And consequently that we just met Juliette today.
But she’s 5.
A tall, lanky, beautiful 5 year old little girly girl. Who always brushes her hair but never looks like she did and of course loves chocolate…
….like her mother. Although I did go through a very frightening couple of months, while pregnant with little Scarlett, where chocolate made me puke. Oh that was horrible.
I couldn’t even watch the Lindtt truffle commercials at Christmas. You know the ones where they ‘pour’ the creamy filling into the truffle – I *love* those things. But the commercials made me run to the bathroom.
I was TERRIFIED that my love for chocolate would be gone forever. I also hated coffee while pregnant with Scarlie but that wasn’t as devastating. That I could move past. But chocolate…
What. Would. I. Do.
Move on to caramel and vanilla, that’s what. I ate SO much caramel. It was worth it.
But I digress.
Juliette adores chocolate (and my obsession has thankfully returned). So obviously when I asked her what kind of cake she wanted for her birthday, first she excitedly said, “Tinkerbell!” and then I clarified, “No, the flavor.” and she even more enthusiastically said,”Chocolate!” with big shining lights in her enormous eyes.
So I broke out my favorite deep, dark chocolate cake recipe. Which I am just at this moment realizing I have been making for about a year and half over and over again and have not posted the recipe. Goodness me.
**UPDATE** The recipe is now posted 馃檪
I’ll get right on that for ya’ll. It’s the best chocolate cake ever. I found it in cupcake cake form but have had no trouble making it into cakes.
Did I just type ya’ll? (eyes roll, no I am NOT from Texas)
Between Juliette and Auntie Natalie they came up with a design for the cake and insisted I use a marshmallow fondant. I very strongly dislike eating fondant – even marshmallow fondant – however the marshmallow stuff is a lot tastier (I still picked it off) and oh my word it is SO fun to play with.
I made sure there was a nice layer of swiss merengue buttercream under the fondant. I love chocolate, but oh swiss merengue buttercream how I adore thee.
Of course the design for the cake was 2 tiers, which was fine, it’s my favorite size to make and it looks pretty. However…
…Juliette only has one friend.
I do not say that out of meanness. It’s fact. The poor thing.
Seeing as we just moved here this last summer, she had to leave all her little friends behind in Colorado. Since she isn’t in school yet she doesn’t have that automatic little group of friends and all the kids at church that are her age are boys. She has made one friend so far since we moved here. Gloria is a super sweet little 2nd grader who goes to our church and who’s family we know pretty well now so in the hopes of trying to sort of make up for lack of quantity I said we could have Gloria’s family over for dinner and cake and then offered to have Gloria spend the night. Juliette thought that was a great idea so that’s what we did.
All our kids sleep in the same bedroom so the boys got kicked out for the night and slept on the living room floor while Juliette and Gloria took the bedroom.
None of the kids got to sleep until about 10pm – the boys kept ‘sneaking’ out of bed and getting carrots out of the fridge to snack on. I put sneaking in quotes because they are as loud as elephants but they thought they were being sneaky, and of course the girls were talking and giggling – but they had fun and I would say the party was a success.
And the cake, although it didn’t turn out exactly as I had planned, turned out pretty good and I had a lot of fun making it and even more fun eating it!
Juliette loves to dress up and was actually wearing one of her many flower girl dresses at the beginning of the party, but she is also very, um, enthusiastic about her play and ended up tearing the dress. So she changed into her next favorite…her princess dress from Halloween a couple years ago. She wears it almost constantly and apparently thought her next most appropriate dress for her tiny party.
She’s so cute.
Well, now you are a little bit caught up with what’s been keeping me crazy the last couple weeks. There’s more but I don’t think you want to here about the drama of me trying to clean my house and actually keep it clean.
Onto Linus’ birthday party…. he wants cake pops. Wretched, wretched cake pops. Ugh.
I can’t imagine things will turn out well.
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