Birthday Cakes Through the Years

Homemade, store-bought, doctored...we've done it all.

Maybe it’s because my oldest daughter’s birthday is coming up, and for the second year in a row she’s not at home to celebrate it with us (the nerve of a college sophomore!), but I’ve been very nostalgic about the girls’ cakes and parties through the years. No one would ever confuse me with ZoeBakes here, but, I’ll say this: we had fun. Here's a little round-up.

Chances are, if the cake was homemade, it was almost always some form of chocolate mud cake. The first photo up top is also mud cake, decorated with a ring of Dum Dum lollipops around the perimeter (a Victoria Granof trick), but here is Phoebe eating a version on her 5th or 6th. She used to love having heart-shaped cakes because her birthday is so close to Valentine’s Day. I shaped it into a heart using this old Heloise hack…