One Year Old Birthday Smash Cake
A few weeks ago I learned about a new tradition that wasn’t around when my children were small. It’s the one-year old birthday smash cake, a tiny cake you set in front of the little one for them to eat with their hands which in the process gets rather “smashed”. But rather than spend a lot of money on a tiny cake to be smashed, we decided we could just make our own homemade one-year old smash cake!
My first couple of experiments didn’t really work as I had hoped. I adjusted a cake recipe down to about a quarter of its original proportions and then tried baking it in a small pyrex dish. But the edges kept burning before the middle was cooked -AND – my daughter was hoping for a cake that was taller than what that strategy was turning out.
Instead we ended up making a 9×13 cake using this chocolate cake from scratch recipe. We then used the little pyrex dish like a cookie cutter to cut a couple small round layers from the finished 9×13 cake. This gave us a couple cake layers that were about 4″ round.
This approach did leave us with about half of the 9×13 cake leftover, but it was good eating for us adults for the rest of the week!
Once we had our two layers, we simply used my stabilized whipped cream recipe as a frosting. This worked perfectly and we liked that it was a very low sugar option for feeding to a little one too.
For a final decoration, we used blueberries cut in half because our birthday boy LOVES blueberries.
Of course, he picked all the blueberries off first, and then with no better ideas about what he should be doing with an entire cake in front of him, he decided the best option was just to face plant into the cake and see what he could get in his mouth with that strategy. For that moment alone it was worth making our own smash cake. 🙂
He still couldn’t quite believe this whole cake was sitting in front of him, but before long he was having a smashing good time.
So if you’re looking for ideas for making a one year old smash cake too, I would encourage you not to stress too much. It really doesn’t have to be a gorgeous work of art. Our cake wasn’t perfectly straight and a few stray crumbs got in our whipped cream frosting. But we had plenty of good times, fun photos, and happy smiles all around with the little homemade smash cake we whipped up in our own kitchen. Here are the links again to the recipes I used:
Homemade chocolate cake recipe
Homemade whipped cream with stabilized version too
