Summer

Hooray!!! It's the first day of summer today. Yahoo! For my family, however, not only is it the first day of Summer, but it's also my grandpa's birthday. This year I did not make anything, but thankfully I'm still trying to get you all caught up on all my previous baking, so i shall talk about the cake i made last year.

So this is the cake that I made for my grandpa for his birthday. That time instead of doing two cakes in one day like i did the first time i baked, I this time made two cakes in one week because it was the same week as Fathers Day. As you can see, in this cake, I used a chocolate butter cream icing. for some of the decorations, all the blue icing, I simply took the chocolate butter cream and didn't add the cocoa to it. Trust me that was a VERY bad idea. The icing was runny and drippy and dripped all over the place. When i piped it onto the cake it ran all the way down the sides, as you can see at the lower left. Also when i added the blue coloring to the de-cocoa-afied icing, it wouldn't mix in all the way! Even after i mixed it to the best of my ability, you could still see swirls of white, as you can see in the lower middle. However, thankfully, some of the icing came out perfectly fine, as shown in the lower right.

Now for some advise for all of you. For one thing, if you're going to do a cake like this, where you take it out of the pan and decorate it, do a border. Always do a border on cakes like this. Without a border you will see more of the mistakes and creases in the icing where you switch between icing horizontally and vertically. It also shows where you ran into the cake tray if you don't put a border. Another advantage to doing a border is that it breaks up the cake for the eye and it's not quite so hard for people to take in. Of course there are exceptions, but I'll not get into those now, least I confuse you if I haven't already.

More advise? Make it interesting. however it is possible to make it too interesting. Make sure you reach the balance in between. A cool decorating trick for candles, at least I think it's cool, is when your decorating the cake to put on the top of the cake, or where ever you want the candles to go, little dots or flowers or something. This way when you put the candles in the have a nice little border and it doesn't look as much like you are massacring the cake. Well I hope I've helped you out a little bit. Thanks for reading! Check in again sometime soon!