Birthday preparations - Part two: The Cake

Simple White cake Recipe

1 cup of white sugar

1/2 butter 

2 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 and 1/2 all purpose flour

1 3/4 teaspoons baking poder

1/2 cup milk

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a pan or line a muffin pan.
2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stir in the vanilla. Combine flour and baking powder, add to the creamed mixture and mix well. Finally stir in the milk until batter is smooth. Pour or spoon batter into the prepared pan.
3. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes in the preheated oven. For cupcakes, bake 20 to 25 minutes. Cake is done when it springs back to the touch.

Chocolate cake

1 box of chocolate cake mix
1 box of chocolate pudding
1 large bag of chocolate chunks
3 tablespoons of milk and 3 tablespoons of butter

Directions

1.  Mix cake according to package directions and stir in chocolate chunks. Pour into pans and bake according to package directions.(cook for 35 minutes on 350°F)

2. Let cool completely.

Decorating a cake is hard stuff.  The essential part is learning the difference between icing and frosting.  Huge!  Which I admit I didn't and that would explain why everything looks so running.  Wow, something so basic and that had a huge impact on the cake.  Another thing that I did check and totally steered me wrong was the amount of coloring that went in the frosting, two tubes and I only got this peony substitute for a grayish color.   Black is not that changing of white icing, you need lots to actually make it change.  Obviously, it is all dependant on the amount of icing and the size of the tubes.  Thankfully this is not a cooking blog and I have nowwhere said that I was an expert.  The amount of icing a big bowls worth and the tubes are the smallest size that you can buy.

I am not an expert or even an aficionado to even expect this to look like a building with a Spider man on top but somehow the mommy guardian angel came, gave me a hand a made this.  It's not great but you should have seen my son's face when he opened the refrigerator and saw the finished cake.  He actually loved it!  And that my friends was enough for me.

Maybe this is the last try at making a birthday cake but a part of me loves to do something from scratch in honor of my little man.  I might try something else next time, who knows?  I would love to hear some suggestions as to what would be good ideas for next year.