Patrick's Birthday Party Round-up: Part Two

After a brief interlude (also known as a Saturday filled with soccer and a friend's birthday party), we were ready for Round 2.  We hosted our families for a Mario birthday BBQ.  Kevin has been on his game with the hamburgers lately (seriously, ask for an invite.  These things are yum.  12 adults ate over 4 lbs of these things!).  I made homemade potato chips, watermelon and salad.  Easy!

I have 6 nieces and nephews so this is sort of like throwing a full-blown party so we must play a game!  Tip Junkie had these super cute and fun Mario Bingo printables.  I printed the cards on card stock and had them laminated.  I had a sneaky suspicion that my boys would enjoy playing Bingo and I wanted the cards to last.  The markers I punched out with one of my scrapbooking punchers.  Totally easy and guess what?  My boys played several times in the weeks leading up to the party.  We also had fun identifying and naming the characters.
 

I bought tons of little prizes at Michael's.   All of the kids won at least once.  In Keith's case, he knew exactly which prize he wanted and took off once he had his disgusting fake teeth.

 

So the only thing left is the cake.  I won't say anything about how much the custom cakes cost because they are beautiful and yummy and straight.  I will just say that this is the first year that I made Patrick a birthday cake from scratch.  He wanted red velvet and I wanted to make him something that would put a big smile on his face before he even took a bite.  

So the Question Block Cake was born.  Let me know if you find a how-to somewhere out there in blogland.  Kevin and I winged it.  I knew that I could cover the cake with fondant and it would be perfect and smooth.  I also knew that I had never worked with fondant before and a huge cake like this would need a lot of fondant.  So I opted for the compromise: frosting with fondant accents.

I baked four layers of Bakerella's (cake pops ya know) fantastic red velvet cake.  I borrowed my sister's square pans and they worked perfectly.  I probably could have tripled the recipe.  I also made the cream cheese frosting and tinted it with Wilton icing color (golden yellow seemed a little orange to me...).  In the end, I had about 4 inches of cake, 2 inches of frosting between the layers and an improvised bottom half.

 Here she is just after I frosted it.  I bought an angled spatula this makes a huge difference.  Luckily Kevin was helping me and thought to put the cake in the freezer.  This saved it from melting.  The cream cheese frosting is very melty.

 Here's the block before the question mark. 

 Figures make a repeat appearance.

 Look at that!  Kevin cut out the question marks from fondant and glued them on the frozen cake with some frosting.

 Patrick loved it.

 Can you tell?

 I also added the 7-UP candles.  Only a 7 year old gamer would get it and I love it that way!