Fertility festivals are now being celebrated throughout the northern hemisphere so why not throw your own spring party?! I decided we should welcome spring. You know how that goes. This time I decided not to go “full pagan” but instead, decided to whip up a cake from scratch in the shape of an egg and throw a little tea party for the kids. Still too pagan for your religious preferences? Well next year we’ll be making cake crosses to celebrate Easter.
This cake was my first (decent) 100% scratch cake. We even made a couple crafts to celebrate the season.
Yes. I did try and make a cake from scratch before. Once. For my husband’s birthday. I told him I was going to make him a Sunshine cake. He thought it was a cute idea but was in for a terrible surprise. And it was a disgrace to mankind.
MY CAKE DISASTERPIECE of 2016. PICTURED HERE FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE:
So, as you can tell, my cake baking skills have improved a bit. I’m just slightly proud of this little beauty– mostly because I thought up the idea, the colors and the name of this cake when I was playing around with the frosting color.
NOW HOW DID I DO THAT? Here are some pics (and I’ll post the link to the cake recipe below). What a fun way to usher in the springtime than a splash of Robin’s Egg blue on your Easter eggs–or, in this case, cake?
Once I baked the cake, I removed it from the pan and flipped it over (sometimes the top of the cake is caved in a bit or dimply). ALWAYS FLIP YOUR CAKE OVER IF YOU’RE AN INEXPERIENCED BAKER LIKE MYSELF. The bottom is just so perfectly flat and ideal for frosting. My cake looked like this: caramelly sweet, dense, moist and just delicious!
After the cake cooled, I wrapped it in plastic wrap and let it sit over night. NOW THAT IS THE TRICK TO FROSTING A CAKE! If you do this, you are much less likely to smear crumbles of the cake into your frosting during the frosting procedure. Do you know what I’m referring to?
Then I cut an egg shape out of “cereal box” cardboard to use as my template for cutting the cake. Yes, I salvage all my cereal box cardboard for a variety of uses 🙂
I cut the “egg shape” of the cake the following morning:
I made my frosting and prepared several bowls for experimenting with colors to use.
Voila! Our vernal celebration.
I also thought-up these little chick and bunny rabbit placemats from some scraps of felt I had laying around. Just use a template that you have on hand (I used a chick plate–sorry, breakfast remnants still stuck-on) and a hot glue gun to seal on eyes and other features like cotton tails and carrots. SUPER FUN! I will be using these for next years spring décor too.
Here is the cake recipe link (the only thing I did differently was use 4 eggs instead of 5, bake for 35 minutes instead of 25 and I substituted whip cream for buttermilk–only because I didn’t have any on hand). The cake tasted delicious!
Also, did you notice the chicks standing in the grass in one of the previous pics? That was one of my “dumb creations”. Just make cute chick cut-out’s from your old cereal boxes, paint them yellow, glue to skewers and prop them up in a box
A Slice of My Trash, Travels and Tots 