dessert

Colorful Rice Krispie Cake

7 Alternative Birthday Cake Ideas

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Last week I was virtually salivating over a birthday cake made with Pimm’s and Champagne poured into a mold to form a jiggly Buckingham Palace. Along the same lines a loyal reader sent me a link to CupofJo’s several unique non-cake birthday cake options.

I added some research of my own, and now share some of the more creative recipes I came across.

Crackle! Pop! Celebrate!

Food blogger Not Without Salt shared a recipe for a Peanut Butter Rice Krispie Treat Cake with layers of peanut butter chocolate icing. It would make for a crunchy bite of cake, but kiddos would likely love this one.

Rice Krispie Treat Cake

Sprinkle Bakes, a baking and desserts blogger I regularly retweet for #yummybday made the even more attractive version Rice Krispie Treat Sprinkle Cake.

Colorful Rice Krispie Cake

Fruity Festivities

Not Without Salt is also the source for this cake made entirely of fresh fruit. In summer this would be a perfect alternative if the guest of honor eats gluten-free. As a huge fan of watermelon, I’m all over this idea. Ironically, despite the blog title, there is no salt in this recipe!

Tasty Fruit Cake

Birthday for Breakfast.

What better way to start a birthday off than with a Cake Batter Pancake Cake? I am in firm agreement with How Sweet It Is food blogger Jessica’s view that “the world would be a better place if more sprinkles were involved.” Using sprinkles in the cake batter that she cooked up as pancakes, Jessica created a tasty treat that would likely bake much faster too! Still, it could use more frosting!

Cake Batter Birthday Pancake Cake

Brownie Birthday Binge

Not as creative as the first few options, this one still takes the cake (ha ha) for chocolate lovers. No wonder this brownie stacks up as the first playful, alternative cake displayed in Foodnetwork.ca’s slide show.

Brownie Birthday stack

Ice Cream Birthday Dreams

This Have A Yummy Day ice cream wreath recipe involves making the ice cream from scratch. However, the idea alone would be easy enough to replicate with store bought. I’d want to try this one actually, with pieces of cake or brownie on the serving tray too. Oh, and definitely a chocolate sea salt caramel ice cream as the base.

ice cream wreath

Chip in for Cookie Layers

This last one would surely be my son’s favorite. He’s asked for cookie cake the last two birthdays, but this one might be in the running for next February. The Cake Blog’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake layers thin cookies with buttercream between the layers holding this tower of goodness together.

chocolate_chip_cookie_cake

Any other suggestions you’d share for alternative birthday cakes? I’d love to read about it in the comments section.

What’s Your Birthday Feast Favorite?

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Have you ever played the car game in which you and your fellow travelers imagine what you’d select for your final supper? You can have anything, cooked perfectly, and by someone else. My menu is the same I’d request on my birthday. Although there may be variations based on my mood on a given day it’s likely going to involve champagne, tomato sauce, pasta, and a chocolate mousse so rich and thick you can stand your fork up in the ramekin.

I encountered a particularly unappetizing birthday menu feast recently. Apparently, the Greeks used to celebrate a birth feast on the fifth day after the infant was born with the following:

…Custom, sooth requires

Slices of rich cheese from the Chersoneses,

Toasted and hissing; cabbage too in oil,

Fried brown and crisp, with smothered breast of lamb,

Chaffinches, turtle-doves, rows of merry guests

Pick clean the bones of cuttlefish together.

Gnaw the delicious feet of polypi,

and drink large draughts of scarcely mingled wine.

(Athenaeus, cited from a third century A.D. anthology, by Linda Rannells Lewis).

This list of cheese, cabbage, lamb, cuttlefish, and “scarcely mingled wine” along with some birds and “polypi” (which I don’t even know how to characterize) makes my lips purse in a “not-for-me” way. Finding a picture of a cuttlefish only pressed my lips together tighter:

Birthday Cuttlefish

Photo credit: PacificKlaus / Foter / CC BY-NC

Worse still, I don’t see a dessert at this Grecian shindig! What kind of feast doesn’t offer guests a dessert? One of the great things about Birthdays are Best has been tweeting all the #yummybday recipes I find.

Care to share your best birthday menu, I’d love to know it. Or, is there a particular food that gets eaten on birthdays where you live or in your family? I want to know those too. Comment below!