Naruto Cake

For my niece's 7th birthday she wanted a Naruto theme. So I found an image of him online and put it on her cake using the good old gel and wax paper transfer trick that I am so fond of. This cake is white confetti cake. I could not decide what color icing to use for the background. I had found some red crystal sprinkles and thought I could ice it in yellow and them use some sprinkles to give it a kind of firey look. Well I forgot to put the sprinkles on before the icing dried and so it was just plain yellow. Then I remembered that his hair is yellow and I thought it would not stand out very well. So I tried to make his hair a little yellower and I outlined it in gray. I also used a star tip to do the hair and that made it stand out and gave it a good spikey look. My husband came up with a great idea to make the writing look nice. He suggested using the gel/wax paper transfer thing and it worked great. He printed off the wording in a font and size we liked and then traced the back and we transferred it to the cake and came out looking just right. I think I will use this idea as often as possible from now on.




This picture shows the dessert sushi my sisters made to go with the cake. They are Rice Krispy treats with Swedish fish and fruit roll-ups. They were pretty fun, I think the kids really enjoyed them.

My Son's 2nd Birthday Cakes

For my son's 2nd birthday in April I had him a bug party. I made two cakes one was a caterpillar made with white cupcakes and the other was a chocolate dirt cake. To make the caterpillar cake I made several (20 something) white cupcakes. I iced them in green and decorated them with M&Ms. Then I poked licorice through each side to be legs. I also used licorice as a mouth and antennas and M&Ms for the eyes. The hardest part was poking the licorice through, using a toothpick to make a hole first helped. By the way I just have to add that adding M&Ms to cupcake does something magical. I can't really explain what it was but these cupcake were just so good and I think it was the M&Ms.

The dirt cake was something I just kind of made up as I went I tried to remember how to make a regular dirt cake and used that basic recipe. First I baked chocolate cake and then cut it into chunks to fit on the plate. Then I mounded some cake on top. Earlier I had mixed together Cool Whip and chocolate pudding with some Oreo crumbles mixed in and refrigerated that for a while. After the cake was made I piled some of the pudding mixture on top then added some more Oreo crumbles. Then I put some gummy worms in it and that was it. It took me like five minutes to put it all together and people loved it. So if you want an idea for a cake that tastes really good and looks pretty neat make a dirt cake. It is sure to impress.

A Book Cake For My Mom

Here is the book cake I made for my mom's birthday in March. She is a huge fan of Dean Koontz and it seems like Lightning is the book that she is always recommending to other people. So I thought it would be fun to make her birthday cake look like a Dean Koontz book and I picked Lightning. To make this I first searched for images of the cover of the book. I mostly came up with the more updated version but when I came across this one I had to use it because it looked a little older and more like the the books I was always seeing laying around the house when I was a kid. I changed the scale so it would fit just right on half of a 9 by 13 in. cake and printed it off. Then I baked a cake (white of course- my mom's favorite) in a 9 by 13 inch pan and cut some off the top to make it level, then I cut it in half and each half would become a book. I wanted it to look like two books stacked on top of each other. I iced three sides of the bottom book in white to be the pages. Then I made some black icing and iced it on one side and the top. Then I stacked the next half on top. I iced it the same way and let it stand for a while for the icing the to get stiff. Then I used the gel to transfer my tracing of the book cover onto the top book and filled in the letters and illustration with the right color icing. I also made sure to pipe a very thin line around the bottom edge of each of the cakes to look like the back cover. One more thing I should mention about this cake was that I iced the black parts the night before and I did just have the cake sitting on a white cardboard cake circle. Well during the night the black food coloring kind of leaked out onto the cardboard so I covered another piece in foil and my sister helped me ever-so-carefully transfer the whole thing from one circle to the other. So just fyi, it is probably a good idea to always cover those cardboard cake circles with foil anyways but especially if you are using black icing. I think everyone really liked how this cake came out, it was definitely more fun then just the standard old birthday cake.

My Parents' Anniversary Cake

This is the cake that I made for my parent's anniversary this year. I can't remember I either used two 9in. pans or one 8in. This cake is really pretty basic just iced in white with three Wilton roses. I was pretty happy with the way the roses turned out. I think this was the first time I made them since learning how to do them in my cake class. I kind of had to re-teach myself. It is kind of hard to tell in the picture but I am pretty sure I managed to mess at least two of them up in some way by dropping them or squashing them some how. But overall they came out looking fine (if stood back and squinted when you looked at them). The part about this cake I was disappointed about was the writing. I tried to make the icing really thin and I also put a lot of gel in it. Well, I way over-did it and it came out looking pretty gloppy. If I were to do it again I would just use regular thin icing and just little gel.

This cake also marks the special occasion when my dad first realized what goes into the icing (a cup of vegetable shortening and four cups of powdered sugar, among other things). He kind of freaked out a little and thought maybe I was trying to kill him. I really wasn't that is just how to make the icing. So just in case you are not aware now you have been warned about what icing is made of (at least the kind I make, but I bet store bought is not any better for you). But I think that you should be fine unless you sit down and eat an entire cake by yourself.

Baby Shower Cake

Here is the cake that I made for my sister's baby shower last November. It was her first girl so she wanted a cake that was really girly looking. We found a cake that was similar to this one at the state fair earlier in the year and took a picture for me to use as inspiration. I ended up doing a different type of flower than the one from the fair but I cannot really remember why. I am sure this flower was much easier to do that must, have been a big part of it. But I think it also had something to do with not having the right tip to make the other kind. This cake was a chocolate cake so I was pretty proud of the lack of crumbs showing on the white icing. I am pretty sure I used Wilton tip #224 to make these flowers and just put a little dot of white in the middle to make it a flower. The border is done with Wilton tip #21 which is just the star tip. That was something I learned in my cake making class but I don't think you would have to take a class to figure it out. I put white dots all over it probably with tip #3 I think. One thing that I did wrong was you are supposed to let pressure off at a certain point when making the dots and kind of twist the bag a little so the dots don't look pointy but as you can clearly see from the picture I was too lazy to do this so I ended up with some pretty pointy dots. But my sister really loved this cake I think it was exactly what she had in mind. That is one thing I love about making cakes for people, even it they don't come out perfect or totally professional looking people usually just love them because I cared enough to take the time to make it; and I think I do occasionally surprise people with how nice they come out.

Black Forest Cake

Okay so here is a Black Forest Cake that my sister-in-law and I made for my father-in-law's birthday. I found the recipe online by doing a search and choosing the recipe that sounded the best to me. I am pretty sure this one came from about.com: southern food. I decorated it like a lot of the pictures I was seeing. This particular recipe called for 1/4 c. cherry brandy which may not really seem like a lot but when I was pouring it on it was soaking the cake and I was like whoa that's a lot of alcohol. One of the hardest things about this cake was shredding the Hershey bar and getting it on the cake. The Hershey bar kind of got all melty while we were trying to shred it (we just used a regular cheese grater.) Then the hard part was putting the chocolate shreds on the cake. I tried kind of throwing them at it and pressing them in, none of it really worked too well and that is why the sides look a little patchy. I did not partake in this cake so I do not know how it tasted. Everyone said it was good but nobody seemed ecstatic or anything. I am not really sure what I would do differently with this cake. Maybe research better ways to get the chocolate to stick. I also would not use the can of whip cream to do the little dollops on top because thy deflated halfway through the evening and it looked kind of sad by the time we got around to actually cutting and eating the cake. Oh well. Can't win'em all.

Smiley Face Cake

Here is a smiley face cake I made for a family friend for his birthday last year. This cake was really easy to make. I used an 8in. round pan, cut it in the middle and filled it with icing. Then I made yellow icing and iced the entire cake in yellow. I made a second batch of icing and made it mostly yellow and a little bit of black. Then I starred the top with yellow and just did the eyes and mouth by hand. I was going to use the gel and transfer it to make it look more perfect. But I thought it was easier just to free-hand it and I think it turned out just fine.