Polka Dot Birthday Cake

This past week (yes, it took an entire week) I made a birthday cake for Madison, Ben's cousin, who turned 14. She wanted a three tier cake with bright color polka dots and let me tell you, I was NERVOUS about making this cake. I mean, I've made a two tier cake before, but never three! And I had never done bright polka dots either! This was going to be a challenge, but one that I readily accepted!

I began researching and luckily I know someone who is a cake expert who was really helpful (but probably got slightly irritated that I asked her questions just about everyday!). She suggested that I make fondant for the polka dots. This way I could make them ahead of time and could just place them on the cake rather than having to use icing.

I found a marshmallow fondant recipe for the polka dots (which definitely tastes better than regular fondant...less chalky and cardboardy). This was the first thing I made for the cake (on Monday evening). It must be refrigerated for at least 24 hours before dyeing it. I used Kroger brand neon food coloring and I definitely recommend it if you want bright colors.

Before I started dyeing the fondant, I covered the fronts and backs of my hands with crisco, which kept them from being permanently dyed hot pink or lime green! Or I guess you could wear gloves, but that would be taking the easy way out! To make the polka dots, I searched my kitchen for all sorts of different sized glasses - juice glass, shot glass, the reverse side of a icing tip, etc.

Here are the three cakes before I stacked them. Once they were stacked, I stuck a 1/4" wooden dowel rod, which I sharpened with a pencil sharpener, down the middle of each cake to hold them in place. To smooth out the cakes, I used a trick that I have begun to see more often: The Viva Paper Towel. AMAZING! These paper towels are definitely worth the cost. I smoothed out the cakes as much as I could with an offset spatula, then let the icing dry about 30-45 minutes before smoothing it out with the paper towel. Here's a video that demonstrates this technique.

I used buttercream icing for the entire cake. I doubled this recipe and even had some left over!

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.

Make sure you add a little more water than it calls for, because the icing has to be very soft so it's easier to spread. I even stuck the cakes in the refrigerator for a while before icing them so they would harden a little.

To fill in the areas where the cakes didn't quite come together I used white icing and made large white dots. This way it didn't take away from the bright polka dots by adding another color to the cake.

This was the most challenging cake I have ever made, but I made it! Whew! I wonder what my next cake project will be! (Ben's birthday is in three months. It's going to be hard to top the fish cake.)

My Birthday Cake

For my 24th birthday one of my best friends, Katie, made my birthday cake! This cake was beautiful! It is completely homemade - the cake, the icing, everything. The cake was four layers of chocolate with chocolate icing and a pint of Guinness in the cake!

We spent the weekend at my family's mountain house on Petit Jean Mountain in Arkansas. As you can see, one of the activities was shooting clay pigeons. So much fun! Ben did a good job of planning activities! That's me shooting and probably missing the clay, however I will say that I hit my fair share.

This birthday was so much fun! I can't wait until my 25th birthday, dun dun dun! Mid-twenties!

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.

Chocolate Cake with Caramel

For Ben's grandparents' birthdays I made a 2-layer golden vanilla cake with caramel swirls and chocolate buttercream frosting. This is seriously the best chocolate frosting I have ever tasted (and that's saying something). It was only the 2nd time I have ever tried to make chocolate icing (gasp!) The recipe is from Southern Living and is easy to make (unless you have a stubborn 1980s hand mixer that dies every other minute). I used Hershey's chocolate cocoa which costs more than the store brand, but I think it's worth it. Southern Living also had a mint chocolate chip buttercream frosting that I wish I would have known about when I made the mint chocolate cake! I doubled the icing recipe because I my original idea was to make a 3-layer cake, however I discovered that the lid for the cake stand would not fit with 3 layers, but it was good to know that doubling the recipe makes plenty of icing for 3 cakes.

Chocolate Buttercream Frosting - double this recipe

• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1 (16-oz.) package powdered sugar
• 2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 5 to 7 Tbsp. milk

Directions
1. Beat first 3 ingredients at medium speed with an electric mixer until creamy.

2. Whisk together powdered sugar and cocoa. Gradually add powdered sugar mixture alternately with 3 Tbsp. milk, 1 Tbsp. at a time, beating at low speed until blended and smooth after each addition. Beat in up to 4 Tbsp. additional milk for desired consistency.

I added apple-dipping caramel to the cakes after letting them bake for about 8 minutes. I added the caramel later, because I was hoping it would prevent it from sinking to the bottom, but it didn't, so the caramel taste was not as prevalent as I had hoped it would be.

Like other times before, I iced the top of the first layer, placed the second layer on top of the first and iced the top of it. I saw on Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee that she put a couple of pieces of parchment paper on the cake stand when she was icing the cake, then simply slipped it off whenever she was done. The key word here is simply. It was not so simple to pull the sheets of paper out from under the cake after I had finished icing. This could have been because I did not have parchment paper and instead used wax paper. From now on I'm going to stick with just cleaning the cake stand with a damp paper towel.

To ice the cake I tried a different technique. It's more of a wispy look. I used my large offset spatula and a spoon to make the affect. Put about 1 cup of icing on the top of the cake and spread the frosting to the edge and down the sides of the cake using a sweeping motion. You will need more than 1 cup of icing to complete this task, but it's easier to work with a smaller amount then add more.

To add a little color, I used a few strawberries. I cut them and tried to fan them out a little bit.

Ben's Birthday Cake

For Ben's 23rd birthday I made him a fish cake. He's a big fan of fly-fishing so I thought this would be perfect. When I first started this project I had no idea how I was going to manage to make a cake look like a fish. After consulting some friends, Sarah had the brilliant idea of using a cake pan that looks like a fish. So I began googling "fish cake pan" and found a whole bunch, but I was in bit of a time crunch so I needed to find a place either in Little Rock or at least close by so it wouldn't take as long to ship. I then googled "cake decorating Little Rock". Of course Hobby Lobby and Michael's came up, and I called them, but all Hobby Lobby had was a tropical fish pan and Michael's didn't have anything. I didn't really want to do a tropical fish, I wanted more of a trout or bass fish. Vanness in Little Rock also came up in the search, but they do not have their own website and I had never heard of them so I called and much to my surprise they had a bass fish cake pan.

I was expecting a metal cake pan, but it turned out to be a plastic one. I had never seen plastic cake pans and had no idea they can go in the oven, but apparently they exist and they come in a wide variety of shapes.

Luckily the cake pan came with instructions. For the fins, eye, and lips I used Wilton's Candy Melts that come in a bag like this. For the fins and lips I used peanut butter flavored and for the eye I used chocolate flavored.

Before I baked the cake, I followed the microwaving instructions on the candy melts bag (very simple), then I poured the melted peanut butter and chocolate into the pan on the designated areas and put it in the refrigerator for about 10 minutes. The molds should pop out pretty easily. I set the fins and stuff aside and poured the chocolate cake mix into the well-greased pan and put it in the oven to bake.

After letting the cake cool on a cooling rack for 30 minutes or so, Ben put the platter I was going to use on top of the pan and flipped it over (I'm always terrified to do this step, so I make Ben do it). At first the cake did not come out of the pan, so I gave it a slight tap and it came out looking perfect!

For the icing, I used the Wilton's paste in moss green, because I thought this would be somewhat close to the color of a bass fish. I iced the sides of the cake with an icing spatula and now it was time to start on the scales. For this, the instructions suggested to use tip #103. I used a gallon sized plastic bag for the icing and started at the tail end of the fish. It's hard to explain how I made the icing look like scales, but I'm going to try. I went line by line and started icing and I would ice a little bit then slightly pick up the icing bag while icing was still coming out and go back over the line a little bit. That is a horrible explanation, but hopefully the picture will better explain it. After icing, I put the fins, eye, and lips on!

Fore!

For Ben's dad's birthday I made a golf themed cake. My first thought was to make a huge golf ball, but again, did not have the sports theme pan and was not quite ready to buy one/Ben told me I did not need it (but someday I'm going to get one). After talking with some friends, I decided to use a 9 x 13 cake pan and design more of a golf scene than an actual golf ball.

In order to make sure I would not have any trouble transporting the cake, I found a piece of wood about 1 inch thick by 24 inches long and 12 inches wide. I covered it in foil and put the cake in the middle of it once it cooled. For the design I wanted to do something realistic but still basic and colorful, and what I came up with was a green next to a sand trap.

To start out, I iced the entire cake with cream cheese icing. I drew a somewhat exaggerated and curvy line with green icing using an icing tip with a small round hole. This line served to separate the green and the sand trap. Right after icing the cake, I put brown sugar on the right half that was going to be the sand trap. I used quite a lot of brown sugar so that it would cover the top and sides and the cake. This stuff really looks like sand! Then for the color for the green, I just mixed green food coloring until I got a bright kelly green. Then I used an icing bag and a tip that was jagged so that it would look like freshly mowed grass. To make the grass I iced one line then move down and ice another line. This was the most tedious and time consuming part of the decorating.

On the green I made a 18th hole flag out of a plastic cocktail sword and cut out 2 little sheets of paper and wrote "18" on both, then glue it to the sword handle and for the hole I used just a little bit of chocolate icing. Once I was done with all of this I still thought the cake was missing something. It just looked too plain to me, so I began calling places like Party City, Kroger, Hobby Lobby to try to find golf figurines or anything to add to the cake. No luck. After just about giving up, I tried Wal-Mart and they said their bakery makes a golf cake and they had the plastic accessories that customers can buy. (I love Wal-Mart!) And just as a little bonus I hot glued golf balls and tees on the board around the cake. I was pretty proud of this cake and can't wait to make another golf cake so I can try out some other ideas.

Hayden's Baseball Cake

This was a last minute cake for Ben's cousin Hayden's 10th birthday. This was just the family birthday party for Hayden, so I was not as pressured as I might have been if I were decorating the cake for his actual birthday party.

It was a yellow cake and chocolate icing (very popular and the same type of cake as my first post). I used my 9" Calphalon pans to make the 2-layer cake. At first I was not going to decorate the cake, just put candles on it. But Ben and I started thinking if there was an easy design that I could do without having a lot of preparation and new decorating tools. Hayden eats, sleeps, and lives baseball, so naturally he would want a baseball cake. I sketched out the design on a sheet of paper, which was easy. Then we went to the grocery store and purchased a tube of Wilton's red piping gel.

The piping gel is not the easiest stuff to use, but if you're just doing a simple design it works fine. This is not the fanciest cake I've ever made, but I think it served its purpose. Next time I make a round cake with a sports theme, I want to use this Wilton's Sports Ball Pan.