Monkey Face Baby's First Birthday Cake Using Ingredients from Your Pantry. No Joke!

I am not a planner.  Not in the least.

Let me clarify.  I am not a planner for anything besides the essentials. 

Lets just say that being a mom to 4 little kiddos, and running a handmade business, and trying to blog, and making sure that I get my kiddos to school and sports and whatever else they've got going on, while making sure that I honor my commitments to church and whatever else, and being a wife and getting ready to go on vacation doesn't leave a lot of time for fluff.

Ya know what I mean?!

We were going out of town for a friendcation during my baby boys 1st birthday.  Awesome right?!  Of course awesome.

We were so excited to get away.

So, like usual I packed what everyone needed.

I grabbed baby boy a box cake mix (cause thats how we roll)

Then, after I took lots of time preparing and baking that cake *not*

I decided I had time leftover to make this cake not so boring.

But what was I to do?

Then, I thought.  He's always been a monkey to us.  Every since he was born.

Seriously.  He has reminded me of Turk from Tarzan so many freaking times!

AmIRight?!

So, then I started to try to figure out how I could make a monkey face.

Lucky for us our Friendcation was at the cabin and I could raid the pantry

I was on the hunt for anything brown.

So we colored the frosting brown with cocoa powder

We toasted a bit of coconut

We found some chips ahoy cookies

and we found some crushed graham crackers.

I think we could pull this off!

And we did!

First I did a little sketch of what the face would look like on a paper.  A little planning goes a long way!

Then I took a toothpick and traced the outline in the frosting

Then I just started to fill in that space with the toppings.  Slowly building up a cute little face

Now is it perfect?  Nope!

Do I care that it isn't perfect?  Nope!

What I do care about is that my family was all together, enjoying the time that we had with each other.  Baby boy had a birthday cake that was representative of him.  And we were surrounded by people that we love and care about.

That, my friends, is what is important.