Have Your Cake

I got a cake mix to make for Mitch for his birthday and when I wasn't looking he went ahead and made it himself.  (I would have made it bundt style because he is always saying "let a bundt cake do the talking" and I would have used chocolate frosting, but you know, whatev.)  He made a jello cake with plain whip cream for frosting.  The whole thing was so sad - the man making his own cake from a mix, using plain whip cream for frosting instead of mixing it up with some cream cheese - that I thought I would pretty it up a bit for him before I took it over to his parents for his birthday party.  I was planning on it saying, "Happy Birthday Mitch!  I ♥ you!" and that would be happy surprise when he took the foil off to cut it.  (And also, of course, everyone would then think I am the one who made the cake instead of letting the birthday boy make it.)


I took out my professional cake-decorating tools (some old tubes of frosting and the tips that came with them) and got to work.  These are the results:

You see, I discovered after writing the "happy" that the tip I was using was too small.  The letters were too thin and looked like they were written by someone with Parkinson's disease so I switched to the tip with a bigger hole.  It was a really big hole.  And in my defense, it's really hard to get cheap tube-frosting to stick to whip cream.  The letters were too big and I was not going to be able to fit "birthday" on the cake much less "I ♥ you Mitch".  At most I would be able to fit "birthda" but that would be so lame so I just left it at "Happy Birth" and added some flowers to try to distract from the abbreviated message. I posted it on Facebook and got a comment from one of the best amateur cake makers I know, Carrie, who makes cakes that look like this:

A campfire, a sparkly river and life-like trees and rocks.
Somebody is a bit of a showoff.

  
Carrie said it is the best "Happy Birth" cake she has ever seen!  So now I'm feeling pretty confident.  Change the category from "Happy Birthday" to "Happy Birth" and suddenly I'm Number One! 


I guess I was feeling too big for my britches after my wild cake success last year for Mitch's birthday:

It's a heart-shaped cake!  Awwww cute! The picture is supposed to be a rabbit but unfortunately looks more like a pear with boobs.  Again, I couldn't fit Happy Birthday on so I just wrote H.B.  He knew what it meant.  


Maybe I'll just ask Carrie to make Mitch's birthday cakes from now on.