Our Monkey's First Birthday

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So, obviously we don't have a pet monkey. That's just the nickname we gave our daughter -- and how she is referred to online outside of our circle of friends and family. She recently turned ONE and I thought I would share a little bit from her little party -- it consisted of my husband Aaron, myself, and Aaron's parents.

The Monkey loves Cocomelon and I really wanted to throw her a Cocomelon themed party but there aren't many decorations that are specific to Cocomelon -- the only thing I really saw was a cake topper (of course as I look online, now there are more decorations -- insert eye roll here). So I decided to go with this:

It was still "melon" themed and it was just cute. I was going to try to make her a cake that looked like a watermelon like in the photo -- but I've never made that high tier of a cake before and I wanted it to be perfect. I'm no baker...I'm a box cake queen though. My mother-in-law bought a box cake, and some already made frosting and I decided to make a marble-like cake.

The cake mix and frosting I used were: 

Pillsbury Moist Supreme Classic White Cake Mix 

Pillsbury Creamy Supreme Vanilla Frosting

The box cake has two sets of directions -- an option for the whole egg, or just egg whites. I decided to go with the egg white recipe since I planned on dying the cake I wanted it to be as true to those colors as possible without the weird yellow shading that the egg yolk could have created.

After the cake was mixed I separated the cake mix into three bowls. I used some Wilton food coloring to make pink and light green (I started with a few drops and added as needed to get the color I wanted). Due to using egg whites only, the mix was really really fluffy I had to make little patches of the colors until it looked marble-like while I separated the cake mix into two 9" round pans.

After they were done baking, this is how they looked. After they cooled I took a long knife and cut the top off of one of the cakes so it would be level and the second "tier" wouldn't be all droopy. 

I took some frosting (white) and put it on top of the first layer then set the second layer on top. I originally was going to just do all white frosting, but I thought it would look fun if I could actually try to make it look like a watermelon, even though it wasn't as high of a tier cake as in the picture. I separated the frosting and dyed them pink and light green -- to match the cake and came up with....

THIS! The "seeds" are chocolate sprinkles and I made it look glossy by dipping the spatula in water and smoothing out the top of the cake. I was going to try to do that for the edges but I barely had enough frosting to do the edge green, that I didn't want to thin it out anymore that it already was.

After adding the topper and the #1 on the cake, this was the final product.

Happy Birthday, Monkey.