Getting better at this

Nick only had birthday pie last year, and no party so this year I decided to have him invite a few friends over to the house. It was probably his best party yet. It was 50+ degrees outside and all the guests were truly his friends, mostly kids who live in the neighborhood plus his best friend from preschool that he still keeps in touch with. He chose an army theme and I was pretty proud of how the cake turned out. I had planned a fancier design but I had a few interruptions in party preparation this week so it ended up pretty simple but the camo came out just as I hoped it would. I was running out of frosting when it came time for the finishing touches so the border was minimal but it did the job.

I researched putting camo on a cake rather thoroughly - it's not as easy as it looks, not for someone with very limited artistic talent. I saw a lot of poor examples of it. I ended up doing a buttercream transfer (my go-to cake trick), using a pattern I copied off of Nick's coat, and I smoothed it out with Viva paper towel. I used the Chocolate Fudge Cake recipe, 1 1/2 times the recipe for a half sheet cake. I used the Easy Buttercream recipe for the frosting (a few batches). If you follow that link to the buttercream recipe, you'll see that my cake decorating skills are improving.

I also made camo cupcakes, basically following these instructions, using Duncan Hines cake mix.  I used the small boxes that make 12 cupcakes, one of yellow, one of devil's food.

I'm hoping to do a little more blogging this year but I'm not making any promises.