Riley's Cake

Riley is seriously the cutest little two-year-old I've ever met. He calls me Peaches (that's my nickname down in Florida... Since I'm from Georgia, y'all!) and he's got the sweetest little smile.

His birthday was also this past Wednesday (just like Joy) but his party was today. So since he's part of Joy's family, I made his birthday cake too!

The theme was Jeeps and I used this cake as an inspiration. Of course, it didn't matter how inspiring the picture is, if you can't find any toy Jeeps to put on top! I think we spent 10 minutes looking through the Hotwheel and Matchbox cars before we found the right cars.

As far as the decorations go, it really wasn't that hard. I made a 9x13" cake, and  9" and 6" rounds, then I just sorta cut up the round cakes and strategically placed them on the sheet cake so it looked like hills and valleys. And it didn't really matter that the cake crumbs (marbled yellow & chocolate) got in the icing, because it looked more like dirt.

The trees are just ice cream cones cut down to smaller sizes, then covered in a leaf tip (#67, I believe), and I used that same shade of green for the grass (grass tip, obviously). The thing about the grass, though, is you gotta make sure the icing isn't too thin, or the blades of grass will just look all droopy and such.

The mud hole is just chocolate icing and piping gel mixed together to look all dirty, with some Oreo crumbs sprinkled in. And the trail? Graham cracker and Oreo crumbs.

The river is white icing with blue-tinted piping gel smoothed on top so it looks all watery and such. Joy and I ran the little Matchbox cars all over the cake to give it "tire tracks" (although to be honest you really can't tell) but when Joy put cocoa powder on their tires, it looked awesome.

My favorite part, though? The candy rocks:

We got them at Wal-Mart. How amazing is that?! And they tasted delicious too, in addition to looking perfect.

So that was Riley's cake. I wasn't able to go deliver it with Joy, but she told me it arrived safely and everyone at the party (including the birthday boy) loved it.