My daughter on the outside seems like a jock - it's true, just check out the inventory of bags and shoes and other equipment in her room. But on the inside she is pretty creative. One creative outlet we share is making fun cakes together for her birthday. We've made a giant pink airplane, a giant ice skate. a tie-dyed t-shirt, and a mountain with mountain climbers (the party was at an indoor climbing gym :-)).
This year, as we raced around town stocking up on survive-the-storm supplies, she mentioned it would be cool to make a cake that's rainbow on the inside. We swung by Michael's and found this great kit, the Checkerboard Cake Kit from Wilton:
While we were there, we saw a super cool cake idea - a chalkboard cake.
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Neither of us had used fondant before, but they had black fondant right there in the cake aisle (naturally) so we thought we'd give it a shot. We found two great videos on line (here and here) that gave us a tad more confidence. For the cakes we used regular boxed white cake, and Wilton Icing Colors to make the batter super colorful. To stick the layers together and for the "crumb coat" I used my grandmother's cream cheese frosting which is fool proof (recipe below). The fondant went on pretty well, and the "chalk" was not too hard either. We would definitely try this one again!
World's Best Cream Cheese Frosting (from my Grandma Simpson):
1 box cream cheese (don't buy reduced fat!) (8 oz)
1 stick butter (1/2 cup)
1 box confectioners/powdered sugar (16 oz)
1 teaspoon vanilla
Bring cream cheese and butter to room temperature (either naturally or using a microwave) and whip together with sugar and vanilla. This is great for frosting cakes but might not be the best for piping decorations.
