#SummerGoodies: "This Year was a 'Pizza' cake!" Graduation celebration

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This was a big year for my little girl. She completed the second grade! I can't believe my baby is going to be a third grader next year! I remember third grade... well! She is becoming such a little woman now and it makes me both extremely proud and extremely sad. So, since it's now *officially* Summer break, I knew we had to do something extra special to kick it off! I decided to throw her a "This Year Was a "Pizza" Cake" graduation celebration to show her how proud we are of her accomplishments this year! Get it? "Pizza" cake... piece of cake...? Okay, i'm sure you got it. 

In reality, though, this year was a piece of cake for her! It seemed like she really understood everything she learned and was really able to explain it all to me! She also became a wonderful reader (which makes me SO happy!) So, really... she deserved a bunch of pizza and a pizza cake!

We headed to Walmart to pick up the supplies for our celebration and first made a stop at the freezer section to pick up our DIGIORNO pizzas! I grew up eating DIGIORNO pizzas, so they will always hold a special place in my heart. Plus, they're delicious.

We ended up choosing pizzas that each of us would like: The rising crust three meat was for my daughter, the Design a Pizza Kit with sausage and peppers was for my husband and the white pizzeria! pizza was for moi! 

Since we all have different tastes it was nice to be able to get something we all would like, instead of someone complaining (I'm looking at you, hubby) about our selection.

My daughter had a little *too* much fun using the Design A Pizza Kit ;) 

This kit is was honestly a great idea! My daughter loves helping in the kitchen and this kit let her do just that! Each of the toppings comes in a separate pouch, making for super easy (non-messy!) pizza designing fun.

Thennnnn we threw them in the oven to bake!

While the pizzas were baking away, I frosted the Pizza Cake! Yellow (cheese) frosting for the top and brown (crust) frosting for the side and I also piped a big fat line around the top of the pizza so it would be higher than the cheese and look more like crust! For the cake I simply used my 10" cake pan and filled it with about 3/4 of my prepared (boxed) yellow cake batter.

I let my daughter help me decorate it with the candy (toppings) I had prepared. I made mushrooms by molding caramels into a mushroom shape and using my black food writing pen to mark the "dark" spots on the mushroom, the pepperonis were done using strawberry fruit roll ups and a round cookie cutter, the green bell peppers were made using gummy fish cut in half, the olives were tootsie rolls cut into "rounds" and we used a skewer to poke holes in the center, the pineapple was just dried pineapple (duh!) cut into little chunks, and we used chocolate covered raisins for the sausage and grated white chocolate for the parmesan cheese!

We were super proud of how it came out! It was almost too cute for words. Seriously. I want an excuse to make another one because it was so much fun!

The tootsie roll "olives" and caramel "mushrooms" were my favorite part! They were darling! Plus, the taste wasn't bad either! ;)

She was in heaven. Surrounded by pizza (and cake!) Every child's dream, right?

I also designed a "This Year was a "Pizza" Cake" award for her to make her feel extra special! You can download it here. It gives them that extra sense of accomplishment that they really need ;)

Does she look like a third grader to you?! She does to me. This picture really shows me how she's going to look when she's older! Scary.

Pizza, pizza and more pizza! Seriously guys, if you're going to be celebrating something this Summer... I highly recommend celebrating with some delicious DIGIORNO pizzas (especially the Design A Pizza Kit!) and a pizza cake! You & your family will have so much fun making everything (and eating it!)

I hope you all have a wonderful Summer! I know we will... We have so many fun (and productive!) things planned for our family. This celebration was most definitely a great way to start it all off right!

If you're looking for some yummy and fun recipes for the Summer, check out this site.