Sacrificial Birthday Buddies

Miss Curly Mop turned 1 this week, which meant a week of butter cream fingerprints, half eaten wrapping paper and sticky tape stuck to bottom of our feet.

It also meant another sacrificial birthday cake.

Curly Mop has a favourite toy, one of those small pink blankets with an animal head, in this case an elephant we call Ella.  And so, in a moment of fuzzyheadedness I thought it would be appropriate to make a pink elephant as her first birthday cake. 

Oh cute, you all say.  She loves Ella the Elephant, what a great idea.

Yes perhaps, but what happens when you stick a giant knife in her and cut off her trunk? 

You would think I would have learned this lesson by now.  When the Blonde Bombshell turned 2 she was a mad (crazy mad) fan of Thomas the Tank Engine, so it was a pretty obvious choice that her birthday cake that year would be a Thomas cake.  We went the whole hog - an icecream cake with one of those icing picture disks on top, with Happy Birthday around the edge in icing.  She was thrilled when she saw it, absolutely chuffed and I was mentally patting myself on the back at being such a good Mum. 

That was, until it was time to cut the cake.  The knife was so enormous and the look on the Bombshell's face was sheer terror.  You could see the fear in her eyes that we were about to destroy her favourite train.  How barbaric! 

And so, we then spent the next 10 minutes carefully peeling off the Thomas face so that we didn't have to witness our two year old having a complete melt-down (much like the cake).

And yet we do it again and again.  A big white rabbit for an Easter party: beheaded and de-eared.  A Christmas gingerbread house: the roof torn off and devoured.  And now Ella the Elephant: legs removed one by one, trunk completely removed, tusks eaten.

I have no intention of learning my lesson from this.  I fully intend on a Tinkerbell cake for the Bombshell's 4th birthday, and will deal with the counselling bills later on when she sees Tinks wings ripped off and relished.

                                                               The before picture