Part Two: Baking and Frosting

In yesterday's post I began a special series I dubbed the "Multipart Posting Spectacular." So here is today's continuation. 


For David's cake I decided to bake a "yellow cake" mix-- partially because he likes vanilla flavored cakes and partially because it was the only type of cake mix I had. At some point I'd like to try making my own cake's from scratch, but for now the boxed mixes are convenient and rather tasty. So I gathered my supplies started to work while the oven preheated.

I whipped up the cake and poured the batter into the pans.

Then they hit the oven. I set a timer and approximately 30 minutes later I pulled the cakes out.

 

While I did not make a cake from scratch in favor a boxed mix, I did make my own frosting. And I must say that I learned quite a bit in the process.

I used a recipe that called for:

     1 cup shortening

     2 teaspoons vanilla
     4 cups powdered sugar
     4 tablespoons milk

From that I upped everything but the shortening, for taste and texture. 

As I began to color the frosting I realized two things: 

1.) I didn't have enough food color to make red frosting (so it turned out pink and actually a little darker than the first picture).

2.) food coloring is water-based and doesn't mix well with the oil based shortening (as a solution this recipe would need some sort of emulsifier (eggs for example) so that the two would combine better).

After mixing the frosting a lovely shade of pink I spread it over the entire cake and mixed the remainder into a darker color that was trying to black but ended up a grayish-purple and put that into a piping bag. I piped the words and a border on to the cake and "attached the characters."

Thank you for reading Part Two. Tomorrow in the conclusion, I'll reveal the finished cake. Stay tuned.