The Cake is a Lie

I think I've reached the end of the years where a theme birthday cake is something I make for my son.  He turned fourteen this summer and this was the cake from his thirteenth birthday party (yep, it really did take a year for me to post this).

I feel kinda bad that I never got around to making cookie monster cupcakes, golden snitch cake pops or a sphere shaped death star cake.   But we've thrown him some pretty nice parties, the avatar themed party where everyone air bended and water bended (hula hoops and squirt guns), the pie party, we made pies, several kinds and people ate them outside and the fried chicken and Lord of the Rings party.  We ate fried chicken and marathoned the Tolkien trilogy.

But this was one of my favorite parties, because, as I was making the cake and getting the carrier ready to take to Chuck E. Cheese (they put on a pretty good party and are sweet and kind to boot) I knew that this would be the last little kid party I'd ever host, sob.

So here it is, the portal cake from the game Portal;

The Cake is a Lie

Here are the cakes after being cooked, I even remembered to make the parchment circles for inside the pans and they worked like a dream.

That isn't congealed butter on top but my parchment circle, waiting to be peeled off.

split cakes filled with strawberry cheese

Uh oh, my cakes are leaning a bit.

This isn't a perfect frosting job, because I'm going to cover it in curls of chocolate, so any flaws will be hidden in creamy chocolatey goodness.

The lean sorta self corrected on the drive over, yay!

This was a super gigantic cake and after everyone, a total of 8 people ate we still had a half a cake left, which we ate for breakfast the next day.

I have a confession to make.  I don't follow a recipe for making frostings.  I always make buttercream or cream cheese and they always turn out just by eyeballing them.  So writing out the recipe is a tad strange to me.

I'll post some recipes later, I followed a basic chocolate cake recipe, tweaked a cream cheese frosting by adding pureed strawberries and whipped together a milk chocolate cheese frosting by adding melted chocolate to softened cream cheese and powdered sugar, tipping in a little buttermilk when it got to stiff to spread.

Sometimes baking is like that, experimental.  Sometimes it even turns out tasty.