Happy Birthday!

The baby is now one year old, which officially makes her a toddler (though I think the walking precipitated the name change, as she's definitely been toddling around the place for a while now). She got to celebrate her birthday twice. Once with a cake, in a joint party with my dad. He's been doing his best to turn his home into a beach hut, so I thought it would be fun to make a tiki cake. I also made a little tiki cupcake.

Let's talk about the cake briefly. I got the tiki idea while looking at this monkey cake. I didn't really feel like randomly making a monkey-shaped cake, but the shades of brown also work nicely for a tiki. The cake itself... well, it was okay. Part of it was my fault. I put it in the oven, went upstairs, and totally forgot about it. The cupcake, which I removed from the oven on time, was nice and moist. The cake itself was denser, more like a banana bread. The other issue was the frosting. Very delicious, but I found it to be way too sweet for the cake.

Alright, back to the fun stuff. Celebration number two was just the three of us at home, on the baby's actual birthday. R's family would traditionally go to an ice cream parlor, but since there are no longer any within San Diego county (I checked), we decided to make sundaes.

When we gave her the sundae, the baby just dipped her finger in the whipped cream and ate the cherry off the top. We eventually dumped it out of the bowl onto her tray and broke it up a little bit so that she would have an easier time eating it. She doesn't really like getting her hands messy (sometimes), so she decided the best way would be to lick the ice cream off the tray.

Oh, and an update on the first word. Apparently it stands for any food, as a few nights ago I was getting ready to nurse her and she was making hungry noises then said "cheese" before latching on with relish. Silly baby.