I can’t believe it has been exactly one year since I proudly announced the arrival of my baby boy.

ONE YEAR!

Time has flown by and I can’t believe how much the baby has changed. They grow up so fast.. maybe even too fast.  *sniffle*

I have blogged multiple times about the importance of birthday cakes in our family.  From Princess Dinosaurs, to cupcakes baked inside ice cream cones, birthdays always mean cake.    So of course for this big day we had cake.

This was a little experiment I wanted to try using cake balls baked into a full size cake.  It was actually really simple, and I trusted the girls to help with a lot of it.

We also made mini versions (specifically since we wanted the baby to have a ‘smash cake’ that he could destroy):


Today I also thought I would share what I learned in case anyone else wanted to attempt their own version.


First, I didn’t bake the cake from scratch (ain’t nobody got time for that).  Instead I used these colorful funfetti mixes:


I used my cake pop maker to bake the Aqua Blue cake into cake balls:

Once they were cool, I put them in the bottom of my cake pan (I didn’t have standard sized pans that were very deep so I used a springform pan instead):

I poured the white cake batter over the cake balls and made sure they were spread out evenly. The balls will want to float so you have to keep pushing them down. I inserted the cake into the oven and once it was partially cooked, I double checked that the cake balls were still in place.

After the cake was baked I removed it from the pan and flipped it onto a cake plate:

We frosted it with canned frosting and then coated the top with sprinkles  (This was the girls’ original design choice.)

 It doesn’t look very exciting from the outside, but the ‘wow’ factor happens when you cut into it:

I love how the cake balls turn into “cake polka dots” inside the cake.

We also had a few extra cake balls and a little white batter left over so I dropped the extra into a cupcake pan.

This is what it looked like when those were cut in half:

A fun little surprise!  And the baby seemed to enjoy it:

His favorite part was definitely the sprinkles.  Watching him pick them off one by one was hilarious: