Happy 3rd Birthday Aria!

Aria's 3rd birthday was February 7th! I can't believe she's three years already!

For breakfast we had Birthday Pancakes, Aria loves helping me out in the kitchen so I let her help me mix the batter - I used this recipe. The pancakes themselves aren't actually that sweet, I didn't want to have "icing" on them though. I diced up some strawberries with a couple tablespoons of sugar and set it aside in a bowl so it could start releasing its juice.

Aria ate all the strawberries first, then ate her pancakes. No shocker there. She would happily survive on nothing but strawberries and cheese if she could.

For dinner we had homemade pizza! I made a double batch of homemade dough which came out to 3 large pizzas and 2 small. Above is a feta/goat cheese pizza, half with pesto sauce and half with marinara. We also had pepperoni pizzas and a meatlover's pizza (below).

For Aria's cake I made a chocolate layer cake with a fresh strawberry filling and pink buttercream frosting. The cake is ad odd rectangle shape because my round cake pans are in storage at the moment, so I used a 9x13 pan and then cut it in half to create the layers.

I was excited to try out the rose piping design on the outside of the cake and I'm glad it turned out as good as it did. I had some troubles with the buttercream breaking because the kitchen was too hot - so I had to keep re-beating the frosting on high and chilling the cake in the fridge every few minutes.