Cake Ball Cake

So we finally got around to making a cake for the March birthday boys. Although a little late, it still served a delicious purpose.  We began by seperating jobs - Miss Cass was in charge of making the cake balls and Miss Tam was in charge of making the cake batter.  We cheated a bit with this project and used Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker cake mixes. The difference is that we mixed a packet of pudding mix with Soy milk and then poured it into the dry batter. This is so that it will make the cake denser and moist.

With the cake pop maker, the task of making cake pops is quite easy (good x-mas present from Miss Tam). We have made them by hand before and it is a serious amount of work so with this little tool our cake balls got done in minutes.

While Miss Cass made the cake balls, Miss Tam mixed the batter, preped the cake trays and baked it in the oven as directed by the cake mix box directions. Once the cakes were cooled, we cut them into the sizes that we wanted for our cake shape and began icing them.

After icing the cake ( we also used a bit of store bought icing to hold the layers together only), it was time to coat some of the balls with purple chocolate melts and milk chocolate melts. Then we brought out the piping bag and added a few extra touches to them.

For the decorative icing, we made a buttercream version from scratch. The ingredients are:

1 cup of unsalted butter

3-4 cups of icing sugar sifted

half teaspoon of table salt

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

4 tablespoons of Soy milk

Blend the ingredients with a hand blender for approximately 8-10 mins. 

The last portion of our project was incorporating the cake balls into the cake. Although we had a few glitches along the way, it turned out great! Very delicious! We found the homemade icing was sooo good because it wasn`t overly sweet and it had a very creamy texture.  So our March Birthday Cake for the fellas was a wonderful success!  What will we do for next year?!

In this coming week we hope to blog about a few of the things we have going on. Hopefully we will have a post on one of the crafts we are currently working on, and as well we will be posting some pics from an upcoming Michael Jackson tribute concert we are attending here in Kitchener! 

Stay posted!!

A Fun Find from A Fellow Blogger

Blogging truly is a fantastic way to explore procjcts and ideas from all over the globe, and today we were fortunate enough to stumble upon a terrific blog called Little Birdie Secrets.  The blog is run by two friends who post about crafts, sewing, tips and tutorials for many projecs that interest us. For one of their latest posts called Festive Cookies, they tell of how a friend had brought them beautifully decorated cookies and how they were made using a simple icing embroidery design technique.
They linked a turotial on how to make these amazing cookies.  We watched in awe as the tutorial demonstated the true simplicity of this particular technique...using a paint brush! Who knew:)  Here is that very tutorial:

SweetAmbsCookies

We are so glad that we came across this tutorial and many others like it because it has inspired an exciting idea for our 2012 March b-day cake project.