Happy Birthday Tyler!

Tyler has the best birthday ever - April 6th. He turned 9 this year. Ellen made a Hawaiian feast for dinner, so we went with a luau theme. The volcano cake was Brennan's idea. It was super easy and looked pretty dang cool.

I started with 5 layers of cake, various sizes. It's always nice to have 2 kinds of cake to give people a choice. They tend to have strong opinions about this kind of thing. These are both America's Test Kitchen recipes, almond and chocolate. Yum, yum. Then I used scraps for the top layer to give it a crater look.

I spread frosting between each layer. . .

Then I covered it with chocolate frosting (another ATK recipe) and Oreo crumbs.

I iced the crater with red frosting (if you want really red frosting, the dye paste works way better than regular food coloring), and pulled apart Twizzlers to look like flowing lava. Finally I stuck various plastic trees in the sides.

We managed to locate Hawaiian shirts for everyone.

Dave even found Hawaiian music on Pandora. It sure made us want to sneak back to Hawaii in Ellen and Jason's luggage.

Oh my goodness, we actually found a vegetable Levi will eat - cucumbers.

For the family party, we had Kristen's family, Ellen's family and my parents come over. It was a gorgeous day, so the kids ate outside. Which is good, because they wouldn't all fit in our house too well. Can you tell how these cousins feel about each other?

I love this sweet picture.

Sitting around visiting afterwards with the fat and happy's. See my new area rug from the Crate and Barrel outlet? I love it!

Opening presents.

And playing games late into the night. If Jason's around, games will be played.

Tyler loves his Guess Who game. Next up: Tyler's friend party.