Giant Cupcake - Take Three!

My son turned one last week!🎂 How is that even possible?! It's such a cliche to say this but his first year just flew by! Balancing an insanely hectic work schedule with wife and mommy duties has been intense as always, but I make sure to make time for the things that matter!

I couldn't decide what kind of cake to bake for his birthday, and I thought why not do the giant cupcake again? I mean I already had the cake pan and I had baked it twice already so it seemed like a no-brainer. Of course if you remember from my previous two attempts, the giant cupcake is such an anxiety inducing feat to pull off, I wondered if I  would be able to get it right again. For a moment I considered ordering a cake from some of the many delicious bakeries around but then what would be the fun in that!

With my 5 year old daughter as my trusted little helper, we assembled everything we needed and set to work on the cake. I pulled up my old blog post of the minnie mouse giant cupcake I made for my daughters 2nd birthday and followed those instructions to a tee. I am always so thankful for this blog!

As with my previous attempts, things did go wrong. I somehow managed to overfill the cake pan even thought I put exactly right amount of batter in the both sides of the pan. So it dribbled over my brand new oven! I had to leave it in a lot longer to make it bake all the way through, so the edges were crispy to say the least! Thankfully the crunchiest parts got trimmed off, so it all worked out.

This time I used baking pam spray instead of the crisco &flour combo and the cake fell out of the pan beautifully! 🙌🏾 We left the cake to cool and got to work on the edible cupcake wrapper. Everyone who saw  the pictures of the cake assumed the cupcake was in a silicone wrapper. I'm not sure why I never thought of that option, I could have potentially saved myself a ton of work last time but that would be too easy. Its so much more fun when the entire cake is edible! The last time I attempted this, it took a few failed attempts before I finally got it right.  This time I knew exactly what to do so it was pretty straight forward.  I melted down the candy melts and applied a thick layer to the inside of the pan. Allowed it to set in the freezer and then repeated that with another thick layer and left it over night in the freezer.

The next morning we assembled all the parts. First by trimming and frosting all sides of the bottom of the cake to get it to fit inside the cupcake wrapper shell. This is the most nerve wracking part because the shell could just crack into pieces if not properly made. Once that was done the rest was pretty straight forward. I added the top of the cake and frosted it. I clearly need better frosting skills, I tried to use a whipped frosting which kept melting right off the cake and looking goopy so I scraped it off with a knife to give it a more 'cinnamon swirl' look and then we added his birthday candle and brought my son out to see it!

I have to say, he was altogether supremely unimpressed with the cake, he loved the candle but couldn't possibly have cared any less about the cake. But it was still totally worth it! My daughter and I had a blast working on it together and he will get to look at the pictures one  day and realize how much his first birthday meant to all of us!