Smash Cake Crisis Averted

The babies' first birthday party was Saturday afternoon. We had a cake, that everyone ate, and we had "smash cakes" for the babies.

Until a month ago, I didn't know what a "smash cake" was. For the uninitiated, a smash cake is a small cake made for a baby to eat/destroy on his or her first birthday. Baby has cake for the first time - baby gets all messy beating on a cake - fun time had by all.

I was slow to buy into the idea of smash cakes, or our kids eating cake at all, for that matter. Initially I was opposed to anything that was not whole wheat or had added sugar. My desire for good early childhood nutrition was overcome by the thought of the kids pounding the heck out of a cake and seeing the look on their faces when they ate their first big bite of cake. By Friday, the day before the party, I was really looking forward to having three cakes for the babies to destroy.

Heather had picked out the birthday cake well in advance at one of our local bakeries and ordered three smash cakes to go with the cake. She picked them up on Friday.

This is the cake:

And this is one of the three smash cakes the bakery made to go with the main cake:

For purposes of scale this is my Chap-Stick next to the smash cake:

If this was something I thought Heather would mess with me about, I would have thought these cakes were a joke. If you recall the movie Spinal Tap, there was a scene where the the band wanted a 18 foot Stonehenge replica monument on stage. Because the drawing they made said 18" instead of 18', they got a comically small Stonehenge monument instead. That is what I though of when I saw these tiny cakes. These were not at all what I had in mind.

Heather wasn't too happy about the tiny squish cakes either, so I went down to the bakery to find out what was up with them trying to pass of something smaller than a cupcake off as a smash cake. I didn't get a straight answer about how these tiny cakes could be smashed by a child as opposed to being hurled across the room, and I was told two times by two different people that there was just no way to get bigger cakes to be smashed by Saturday at 1:00.

I don't like to be one of "those" parents who thinks that every little thing is a huge deal, but I was one of those parents in the bakery on Friday. I've seen Cake Boss on TLC. Cake Boss doesn't say how something can't be done; Cake Boss does it. By God, I wanted proper cakes for my kids to smash and I wasn't leaving that place until we had it sorted out.

I am pretty sure I'm not be welcome in that bakery anymore, but we got our cakes:

And the kids did a respectable job of smashing them.