My wonderful boyfriend and his roomie had a big blowout to mark the occasion. Below are the dessert ideas I came up with.
COCONUT LEMON CAKE
This one is nothing to brag about really. I pretty much just baked a lemon cake from a box in a rectangle baking pan and frosted it with white frosting and sprinkled with coconut. The real fun with this one is in the decoarting. I went to Party City and Target and got a miniature polar bear, a miniature airplane, some lil flowers and number candles. See the picture below for how it turned out. Not sure if you can tell, but the plane has crashed into the cake (I'm so darn clever).
PINEAPPLE UPSIDE DOWN CUPCAKES
I've never made a regular sized pineapple upside down cake, but I thought it was a good tropical dessert for a LOST party. I just didn't want another big cake, so I turned the recipe into cupcakes. Super simple.
2 cans of pineapple chunks
1/3 cup melted butter
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 box yellow cake mix
Melt the butter in a microwave safe bowl and mix in brown sugar. Drop about a tablespoon of the concoction into the bottom of a cupcake tin, not lined but sprayed with cooking spray. On top of that drop about a tablespoon of chopped pineapple chunks (you may want to chop the pineapple smaller than it comes). Stir up the cake batter just as it says on the box and spoon the mixture on top of the pineapple and brown sugar/butter (fill almost to the top- just like you are making cupcakes)- Throw that bad boy in a 350 degree oven for about 11 minutes or until they look done. Take them out, let them sit about 2 mins, gently take a knife and go around each cupcake just to loosen them up and then very carefully flip them over onto a platter. I put the platter on top of the cupcake tin and then flip it. Then low and behold, you have perfect lil pineapple upside down cupcakes.
PEANUT BUTTER COMPASS COOKIES
This one isn't anything to brag about either because it's just cookie mix, but as with the lemon cake, the fun is in the decorating. The reason they are peanut butter cookies is because Claire had a hankering for peanut butter when she was pregnant.
Here's a good trick I taught myself. I was in Ralphs and saw a pack of 6 mini pot pie tins. They are round and the perfect size for cookies. It takes a bit longer if you are making alot, but you come out with perfectly round cookies.
All i did was make store bought peanut butter cookies. Put the batter into the sprayed pot pie tins, ran a fork over them in a cross pattern to make it look more like a compass in the end, put a chocolate chip in the center of each and let them bake til they were done. Once they were out of the oven and cooled, I took icing and put the N,E,S,W letters on there and jazzed them up a bit.
