21st Birthday Cake

Here is a birthday cake I made to celebrate a family member's twenty-first birthday. He turned 21 on the 21st, which is a very special birthday indeed! Some people call these birthdays your "champagne birthdays" which is unfortunate for many people who have this special birthday under the drinking age (such as turning one on the first).

For our first birthdays, my parents made my siblings and I a cake in the shape of a "1". To do this, they simply baked a cake in a 9x13 inch pan, and cut some pieces out of it to resemble the shape of the number one (note: chocolate cake on the first birthday makes a real mess, as my parents discovered with my oldest sibling). I considered the possibility of making cakes in the shape of a two and a one. To accomplish this, either the 21 would end up being quite small, or we would end up with a whole lot of cake to eat. Also, making a large one is much easier than making a large two. The number one is a long, thin shape, while the number two is wide, and would be difficult to make tall and wide enough. So I decided to settle on a cake decorated with the number twenty-one using icing. Still looks nice, but is a lot easier to frost then a two and a one would be.

I baked my trusty chocolate cake recipe in a 9x13 inch rectangular pan, frosted it with vanilla buttercream, and then outlined a two and a one in the icing. I piped the outline of the numbers in baby blue buttercream using an open star tip, and filled the numbers in using pastel green buttercream and a slightly smaller open star tip. I added a border and the lettering, and that was it!