Adventures in Birthday Cakes - Race Cars and Dinosaurs

Since Sam's birthday is in October, we often run into an interesting problem: grandparents come on the weekend to celebrate, but Sam's birthday is in the middle of the week.  The easy answer for Sam is to celebrate twice, or three times, or even four times.  The hard answer for his parents is how and when to make the birthday cake.

This year was especially tricky because Sam is in Pre-K and birthdays at school at this age are a BIG DEAL.  That meant we needed to send cupcakes to school for Sam to celebrate with all his school friends.  Simple?  Not once Sam heard the plan.  He immediately decided we needed race car cupcakes.  Perhaps he was remembering his racetrack birthday cake from last year, perhaps he saw a friend with race car cupcakes, but wherever the idea came from, once it was in Sam's head, it stuck.  So the Sunday afternoon before his birthday, I dutifully helped Sam ice his cupcakes into a racetrack:

Sam, as you can imagine, had to taste each color of icing and declared the green color the best (even though each was the same icing, just tinted different colors.

After all that work, you would think the next cake could be a standard round cake, but Sam declared immediately after having the race car cupcakes that he needed a dinosaur cake for his birthday when Nana and Granddad came to visit.  Fortunately, Betty Crocker had a pattern on her website for cutting two round cakes into a dinosaur shape, so last Friday when the boys were at school, I cooked the cakes.  When they arrived home, both Noah and Sam helped ice the cake (both eating more icing than they put on the cake) and add in the candies (perhaps their favorite part to eat), and then collapsed in a sugar coma. 

(the smile was Sam's idea)  I think when May and Pop come to visit early next month, we'll forgo the cake and just have ice cream.  Much easier to manage.