Margarita Cake

For Ben's mom's birthday, I made a cake shaped like a margarita glass (kind of). I am not the most impressed with my cake-cutting skills and prefer to use a cake mold, like I did for the fish cake. However, since I did not have a cake pan shaped like a margarita glass, I had to cut it out with a knife.

I have decided to spare y'all the ugly details about all of the mishaps with this cake, but I will give one piece of advice. Never, EVER, EVER use Wilton's yellow cake recipe. The cake looked just fine, even delicious, but I tried a piece and it tasted like cornbread at best and cardboard at worst. I may just be a horrible cake-from-scratch-maker, but I followed the recipe exactly and that was what I got. So, in a hurry, I bought 3 boxes of Betty Crocker yellow cake mix and needless to say, it was as delicious.

I used buttercream icing for the entire cake. Here's the recipe:
2 lbs powdered sugar (10x sifted)
2 tablespoons Wilton Meringue powder
2 dashes salt
2 cups white crisco
2 teaspoons Wilton no-color butter flavor
2 teaspoons clear vanilla extract
6 tablespoons water

Cream shortening, add butter flavor and vanilla and mix well. Add Meringue powder, sugar, and salt and gradually add water.

I drew a margarita glass on 2 11x14 sheets of paper taped together. I basically had to free hand this (I found out I'm not very good a drawing margarita glasses). I cut out the drawing and laid it on the cake, then cut around the edges.

I suggest using a very sharp knife.

I iced the entire cake with the white icing and let it dry for about 20 minutes. Then I iced the top part with green icing. This icing was amazing. I would have been happy if I had an entire cake made of out this icing and no cake.

To ice the sides of the cake, I used the smooth side of tip # 789. I used a gallon sized bag for the icing and cut a large hole for the tip. This tip makes it easier to ice because it completely covers the sides and to smooth it out, I just went over it with an icing spatula.

For the "salt" on the top of the glass, I used cake sparkles. For the lime, I cut out a small piece of the cake that was left over and iced it a darker green color, then used the lighter green for details.