Birthday Cake Times Three

You may not like Paula Deen of Food Network fame, but you have to admit her boys are downright adorable.  On one of their "Road Tested" episodes, Bobby asks "What's better than cake?"  And then he answers his own question with "FRIED CAKE!"  Sure enough, they visited some place or another (no doubt in the South) where that was the specialty.  I personally think it sounds disgusting, but whatever. 

With that in mind, however, here's MY question - what's better than birthday cake? 

I was recently asked to make a birthday cake for a friend's 40th birthday party next week.  Flushed from my recent hummingbird cake success, I quickly said yes.  Of course, that was before I found out there would be approximately 60 attendees.  Keep in mind, I'm a one-woman show here (and my kitchen isn't so great either - I love this new house of ours but the prior owners didn't care about cooking so the kitchen isn't much).  There is no way I can pull off a cake big enough (or pretty enough) to feed sixty people!

So I broke it down.  "Alright," I thought, "I'll just make a regular-sized layer cake for the birthday boy and a couple of sheet cakes to serve everyone else."  I pondered that one for awhile but came to the conclusion that it just didn't sizzle enough.  After all, this is a BIG birthday.  There should be some BIG cake to go along with it.

You know where I'm headed with this.  If one birthday cake is good, then 2 are better.  And if 2 are better then why not THREE show-stopping cakes??????  I can do that!

This is the Mile-High Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake

I made recently

I'm still working on it, but I'm thinking of a hummingbird cake (of course!), a mile-high chocolate peanut butter cake and then ... well, that's where I'm stuck.  Coconut, maybe?  Caramel?  Caramel with Chocolate?  Red Velvet?  And possibly cupcakes to scatter around for the kids?

If anyone out there wants to weigh in on this, suggestions would be welcome.

Next week will be a baking marathon around here.  If I manage to burn anything (like those Parmesan Crackers) or screw up (which I will), I promise to take pictures and post them!

Wish me luck and stay tuned.......