Farm Theme First Birthday Cake and Pokemon Lego!

Ahhh September. The beginning of my favorite season! I'm so excited to bake all things pumpkin mwahahahaha! Ok, some things pumpkin... 

But I do have something close-- carrot cake! I haven't made a carrot cake in ages, so I went digging through different sources and came across a recipe at Homemade by Holman. It was adapted from Ina Garten, so it had to me good, right?

I must say, in order to make a 10" carrot cake, I had to double the recipe. Let's just say I learned that my mixer's bowl has a certain capacity-- and a 10" carrot cake was not it! Anyhoo, after mixing the batter, it was off into the oven for a total of about an hour (ovens vary, so I would recommend keeping an eye out after 55 minutes).

The carrot cake was to be farm produce themed while the other cake (vanilla with strawberry filling) was to be farm animal themed. After icing this in my go-to cream cheese icing recipe by Martha Stewart (found here), I decorated with sunflowers, carrots, and little leafy greens.

This is the animal themed cake:

There even was a little single layer 6" smash cake for the birthday girl:

The cakes were a hit, and they survived a party at a local barn in nearly 90-degree weather!

Another cake I had this past weekend was a combo Lego and Pokemon theme. the best route to go was to top each Lego stud (I had to look up the proper terminology for that) with a Pokeball. The Lego brick was a half sheet cake cut in half lengthwise and stacked on itself. The studs are discs of fondant.

The birthday boy was very excited! It was "the best cake he's ever had"! Aww shucks!