Sometimes I take photos to capture beautiful light; sometimes I take photos to document life. If I'm lucky, life happens in great light. This was not one of those times. I don't love these images, but I love the afternoon my little family had and I'm glad I have pictures of these memories.
My little guy's half birthday is this weekend. We don't regularly celebrate half birthdays. I usually forget and think about it a few weeks too late. But for some reason, I knew this one was coming, and made a plan.
A half cake for a half birthday. Makes sense, right? Plus then we don't have a whole cake to consume. I cut a cake recipe in half, bake it in one round pan, cut it in half when cooled, stack it and frost it. It looks like a whole cake was cut in half, but that's the fun of it. And even more fun? Root beer frosting.
Sweetpea helped me bake the cake, using this cake recipe from Bakerella. It calls for self-rising flour, which I never buy. So I make it, adding 1 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt to each cup of flour, as all the Google results tell me. And it never works. The cakes always turn out dry and hard. So no more self-rising flour recipes for me. Anyway, this cake is really buttery, even without the butter flavoring (which I left out), so it's not what I was looking for in a root beer cake. I was looking for something more vanilla flavored.
I'm sure the recipe is great, if you're looking for a buttery flavor and you have self-rising flour.
I used the root beer frosting from Lindsey Johnson's root beer cookies. It's the best. Super sweet though, and a little much on a big slice of cake, so keep your slices small if you try it. Or just make the cookies, because they're awesome and a half.
Vanilla ice cream on the side, served with a glass of root beer, of course. Half of us kept them separate and ate the ice cream with the cake; the other half had root beer cake and a root beer float. It was a totally customizable half birthday party.
Do you celebrate half birthdays?
