Super-gigantic birthday cake

I was feeling a wee bit guilty about missing my niece’s 7th birthday dinner, so I decided to make her THE BEST CAKE EVER. By seven-year-old standards, that is.

I channeled my seven year old self. After asking “Why on earth did you think it would be a good idea to cut yourself bangs, you dingbat?!”, I set out to determine what my ultimate birthday cake would look like.

I made some pastry cream (aka fancy pudding) and sliced up strawberries for the filling of a plain-ish yellow cake.

Of course, I sprinkled sugar on the strawberries and soaked the cake layers with some sugar syrup to appease the tiny palate. 

I probably could have stopped at two layers and had a perfectly adequate cake.

But, clearly, nothing I ever do is perfectly adequate, so I plopped another cake on top:

I wish I had a ruler or something next to it to show the height.  In school, we take one cake and slice it into three layers. I just made three full-sized cakes and stacked them on top of each other. It pretty much looked like a Dr. Seuss cake:

The frosting was a chocolate buttercream that I made with a combination of cocoa powder and melted dark chocolate. Try as I might, I could not get my frosting to look the same color as the Betty Crocker kind from a can. I was very worried that she wouldn’t eat it, but she loved it!

    

I was at a going-away party for a friend when the cake was cut.  Not surprisingly, there was a dramatic cake-toppling about halfway through slicing it.

The best part about the giant Dr. Seuss cake? It’s impossible to get anything but a GIANT slice! I think it was a birthday success.