My son's first cake

Cross post at Yet Another Food Blog.

ChaseKBH had a little bit of adult help on this project, but not much.  The above is a picture of ChaseKBH's chocolate Thomas Rocket Ship cake.  It's ridiculously adorable - though the cake itself wasn't wonderful, it wasn't terrible either.  

We started with Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate Chocolate Cake.  We adapted to a half recipe, or at least as close to a half recipe as a three year old can measure.  Instead of following the directions, we simply put everything into a bowl, and mixed it with a whisk.  The cake was baked in a Wilton Rocket Ship Pan, well sprayed with baking spray.  It took about 35 minutes to bake at 350F, but I think my oven is a bit off right now.  I would start checking at 20 minutes and continue from there.

We frosted the cake with a simple frosting consisting of 6 tablespoons of softened European-style butter, 1/2 a pound of powdered sugar, and about 1/3 of a cup of heavy cream.  Everything went into the stand mixer and was whipped until a frosting appeared.  We colored the frosting with Wilton Icing Color - in blue.  After we "painted" the cake with frosting, we sprinkled on an insane amount of blue sprinkles.

The kid sort of looks like a smurf now.

Meteor shower tonight

The Oronid meteor shower should be spectacular tonight and tomorrow early morning, if we get a bit of a break from the cloud cover.  

Air Pressure Rockets!

Air pressure rockets to be exact.  This was a third birthday gift for ChaseKBH from friends who I think actually bought the rockets for Jamie.  Regardless, ChaseKBH enjoyed sending these high into the air.  We have been talking about air pressure for a bit.  He knows that there are zillions of air particles pressing down on him.  Unfortunately, that also means that, on occasion, he yells at the air particles.  I'm not sure how well we're understanding science here.  We do like things that go boom, and we definitely like things that fly.  Thirty pounds of toddler doesn't really get much flight, however.   

The setup itself is super simple - take the stand out of the package, then click it together.  The box came with four foam rockets to launch.  There's a squeezable air reservoir attached to the launcher with a tube - jump on it, and the rocket goes off.  ChaseKBH was a bit terrified of the actual set up.  It took a couple attempts to get him to jump onto the reservoir.  Poor BeaABH just got to watch.