Birthday

Today is my husband's birthday.  He isn't big on birthdays but I am so the kids and I have been fussing over cleaning the house and making his birthday cake all day.  We usually do a homemade (from scratch) cake simply decorated.  This year we did something different.

My middle daughter is interested in everything baking.  She actually wants to own a bakery one day.  A month or two ago she took the first two Wilton cake decorating classes at the local Michael's store.  I believe there are two more classes but the instructor went on maternity leave so we will wait until she returns to finish up the series.

In the meantime, she bakes cupcakes every chance she gets - great for me as I am always trying to watch my weight!   We have experimented with different recipes and decorating techniques.  Today, we did a semi scratch cake I found at "cakecentral", an online community of cake experts.  Basically, we added extra ingredients to a box cake.  It was quite delicious.  My husband and eldest daughter commented that is tasted like a bakery cake.  I think we will keep this recipe around.

We then attempted to do a football jersey cake.  We used a homemade buttercream icing and Wilton fondant.  We have never worked with fondant before as this is taught in class #3 with Wilton but we thought we would give it a try.  Pumpkin did an excellent job coloring the white fondant to match the Redskins burgundy & gold colors.  I was responsible for the name and number we added to the jersey.  I had to do this freehand.  I will be sure to pick up letter and number cut outs for our next project.  This makes for a more professional looking cake.  We forgot to make sure the icing had crusting ability - which only means something to you if you know cake decorating lingo.  This made a challenge to create a finished look but we did the best we could.  We made the sleeves out of homemade rice krispy treats to avoid the difficulty of cutting cake to look like sleeves.  This turned out to be a great solution for sharing the "cake" with some gluten free eaters.

I asked my daughter if she was really prepared to do this 8-10 times a day to fulfill cake requests at a bakery.  She said "yes, I won't be the only one working."  It remains to be seen if this will turn into her life's work but just for today....it was all worth the effort.