Easy Baby Girl Cake Decoration

Our little lady celebrated her 1st birthday last week - time flies so quickly!!

Here's my deal with birthdays and parties for wee little ones - I don't really think that a 1 year old needs a table full of presents, or $50 worth of decorations, or much of anything, really - but I *do* love making cakes, and I *do* think that a first birthday is important to mark - if not for the child, then certainly for the parents.  I mean, come on - the 13 weeks (or longer, if you're less fortunate) of crying and screaming from 7pm-12am and 3am-6am (so glad that's a dim memory now), weeks of no napping, all of the energy going into the kids with not much left over for the marriage - we did it!  We made it through the first year - why not celebrate that and invite *our* friends over to thank them for all of their help and support in the last year?

So that's exactly what we do.  This year, there were some kids in attendance, so I bought a package of sparklers at the dollar store and a package of balloons on sticks, and they were super happy!  Party time was 6:30pm, so the kids stayed up a little late & had cake, then we put our kids down and other kids went home, and the kidless folks stayed around to drink sangria, wine, lemonade, beer, G&T's, and enjoy general merriment.  That's a good way to celebrate a first birthday, in my opinion.

I bought a boxed white gluten free cake mix from El Peto, and unfortunately, I can't recommend it.  It mixed up strangely, and it tasted weird with a thick texture.  Not going to repeat that one.  I wanted a fluffy icing, so I went on a Pinterest Hunt and came up with this one from Little French Bakery. I'll admit, I was nervous about making an icing from egg whites (for a baby and for a party with pregnant ladies in attendance!), but part of the recipe is to pour boiled water into the egg white mix, and that does a pretty good job of cooking the egg whites.  The frosting is amazing - but FYI, I wouldn't recommend putting it in between the layers of the cake - the layers slide around way too much!  However, this frosting is essentially a home made marshmallow frosting, and it was enjoyed much by all.

I printed out an A for little Anneke, traced it onto wax paper, cut it out, then placed it gently on top of the iced cake.  Took out my bottle of candy star sprinkles, and went to down covering the top of the cake with it.

After carefully peeling off the A, I was left with a super cute, super easy, girly birthday cake.  I LOVE how little effort it required.  :)