Birthday cakes...(please don't call me a Wreckerator)

So, the love of my life turned 28 today. (I'm the older one in this relationship...hehe.) And I decided, since we were celebrating our wedding anniversary and his birthday this weekend, that it'd be fun to take on a whole new cake project in order to celebrate his birthday.  You see, with last year's wedding and honeymoon, his birthday sort of went on a back burner, and I've felt badly about that...so I wanted to go all out and make his birthday really special.




So his Mom and I collaborated for weeks prior on surprises and gifts, my Mom sent some hilarious accessories for him to wear while opening gifts (which happened several times throughout the day), and I decided about a week ago to tackle a cake project.

 John and his birthday gear from Korea

I love to bake. This is no secret. But decorating...that's something that's fairly new to me. I've worked with fondant before, but I wanted to do something that involved piping icing and actually drawing a bit...which is adventurous, considering I draw (at best) like a 2-year-old.   Also, I'm so excited to not have morning sickness anymore that I wanted to do something REALLY huge for my foray back into the kitchen.

So I did my research. I went through a lot of designs and a lot of ideas before narrowing it down a bit to a Winnie the Pooh cake. Lest that sound a bit ridiculous for a 28-year-old's cake...I promised John his cake would be something that would make him laugh, something a bit cheesy, but something that was unique at the same time.  Since finding out we are going to have a baby, we've talked a lot about Winnie the Pooh...don't ask me why. So it seemed apropos, goofy, fun, cheesy, you name it. 

After a lot of online research, it turns out that most people who make cartoon cakes use a special cartoon cake pan and a special stencil to help them ace the design without any prior skills.  Being in the sprawling metropolis of South Bend, I soon came to discover that the only cake pans I was going to find were for soccer balls and Dora the Explorer - or *shudder* SpongeBob. (I have an intense fear of SpongeBob.)  I also found that there were no stencils anywhere to be found.

What I did find, however, was a cool little contraption that would allow me to make a three-layer "checkerboard" style cake. As John had requested both Funfetti and chocolate to be part of his cake, this would allow me to 'mix' the flavors without actually blending them together. So I picked that up while I was at Jo-Ann Fabrics. Or Hobby Lobby. One of those stores that sells a lot of different cake junk.

Be warned: my checkerboard cake does not look like this checkerboard cake

After more research, I figured out the only way I'd be able to make this cake happen would be to find a cartoon Winnie the Pooh I really liked, print him out, and then hope like heck that when I tried to replicate it using icing that it would be somewhat recognizable as Winnie the Pooh.  

So I assembled the following materials: a printout of Winnie, an offset cake spatula (for smoothing the icing), three huge containers of both chocolate and white frosting, icing colors (to tint the different colors), all of my icing tips, several disposable icing bags, and everything you could possibly need for baking a cake....beloved stand mixer, spatulas, cake pans, cooling racks...the works.

I decided to bake the cakes from scratch using the recipe provided to me by the checkerboard cake box - seeing as I would need the exact amount of batter they stipulated, I figured it would be easier than trying to guess at it for my first time.  Next time, I'm doing it my own way.  Their recipe called for way too little chocolate in the chocolate half of the batter, and I didn't care for the consistency of my homemade Funfetti cake...I ended up having to make a separate batch of Funfetti cake just to have enough to make the layers even.

Since this is more of a blog about the process and not the actual baking, I'm not putting the recipe - if you want some recommended cake recipes, I'm a big fan of Ina Garten's on Food Network - she works serious magic with her chocolate cake recipes.  Also, making a cake from scratch is time consuming, delicate work - you really want to watch what you're doing so the batter isn't overbeaten, the cakes aren't overbaked, and God forbid, you start assembling before everything is completely cooled.

The cake batter assembly and baking took almost 3 hours thanks to the trial and error process of getting the batter just right.  Adding the ungodly amount of extra chocolate I did (in order to make it up to John's standards) changed the batter consistency, so I had to play around to get everything right. And as it were, my checkers turned out more marbled than anything, but I still had the desired effect.

So onto the icing. This part was time consuming, but easy - I worked with the dyes until I had colors I was happy with, and then after doing the layers of icing and the top and side icing of the cake, I started with my stencil. Basically, I outlined Winnie the Pooh's head and body, and then I drew the rest freehand using black icing first, in order to have "lines" to work with. I then switched to the brown icing in order to "fill in" his fur, using a tiny star icing tip to pipe in the color, and then used the same tip and red icing to fill in his shirt and tongue.  After the color was filled in, I went back over the outline once more with the black icing tip just to make sure I had things how I liked them.


For fun, I drew on my "Happy Birthday" and "John" just to make it recognizable as a birthday cake, but really, my efforts were clearly directed towards the bear. Hope you like it - it was super fun to make, if not really, really time consuming :) But now that I know I can do designs, I plan on expanding my repetoire. 

Please tell me you can identify the character on the cake.

And then I let John see it, and he was excited and happy, which made it all worthwhile. And, thank God, it tasted good when we cut into it and saw the "checkerboard"....(I may have added a bit too much chocolate batter, but no complaints here). :)

Mmmm...cakey.