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In the first email you'll watch & learn exactly how to make your icing perfectly smooth!
Fantastic Birthday Cakes you Can Make
Are you tired of spending hours baking and decorating birthday cakes that just never seem to dazzle and delight? Well, here's some good news! You don't have to have a special talent or an advanced level of cake making skills to create a birthday cake that will have people "oohing and aahing" at the party.
Here's our recipe for a fantastic birthday cake:
2 cups willingness
1/2 cup imagination (add more to taste)
1 bag full of cake making tricks and tips (our free newsletter)
Are you surprised that this recipe doesn't call for more imagination? Of course the more imagination, the better - and more fun - but there are lots of birthday cake ideas out there for you to use.
The best and easiest place to start, especially if you want this birthday cake to wow the guest of honor, is with him or her. Whether that person's passion be playing guitar or sailing boats, there's likely a cake mold to help. If the birthday guest is a child, it will be even easier to find just the right cake mold.
Your local crafts or baking supply store will probably have just the right mold, but you can always find tons more at a cake decorating supplier's Website. Just do a quick search for Novelty Cake Pans or Character Cake Pans.
Many of these mold pans come with decorations and instructions, but if not, no worries. A popular method for filling in the design is to use an icing (decorating) bag with a star tip. Then pipe buttercream stars within the design, changing colors as needed for facial features, etc.
If you want to make your own birthday cake design, again a great place to start is with the guest of honor's interests. To get some ideas, search for this type of cake in Google Images. For example, a search for Beach Birthday Cake brought hundreds of images. So did a search for Golf Birthday Cake.
What's really cool about using Google Images is you can always find new ideas for your birthday cakes. For example, the last beach cake we created was with a sheet cake decorated with blue frosting ocean waves and a graham cracker/powdered sugar beach, Wrigley's striped gum for beach blankets and those little cocktail umbrellas for beach umbrellas. It was pretty creative!
A recent search at Google Images brought up a totally different but also very cool beach cake with a unique design. Instead of the typical sheet cake, it's a round, layered cake. The top has all sorts of fun decorations. A beach volleyball net is made of what appears to be fruit tape held up by pretzel sticks. The sides of the cake really liven things up because they give us an underwater view of sugarcrafted (or piped) tropical fish and coral.
As you can see when it comes to cake ideas, these birthday cake pictures at Google Images can really spark the imagination!
Speaking of sparks – here's a truly fantastic birthday cake idea. It's straight from our "Cake Decorating Made Easy!" Video Books, which by the way have earned lots of kudos, like this one:----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I highly recommend the "Cake Decorating Made Easy!" video books ...Newbies, you will learn that cake decorating is not as horribly scary as you first thought, that within a few practice sessions of your own you will be feeling confident and creative and enjoying the fine compliments of your peers for your wonderful new masterpieces."For you talented experienced cake makers, you will also highly benefit from Sam's techniques. We can never learn too much!"
Amanda van der Gulik, Whangarei, Northland, New Zealand
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And here it is!
As everyone gathers around the birthday cake to sing "Happy Birthday," fill the juice glass with hot water from the tap, and just before the final refrain, pour an ounce or two of the hot water into the well. Your birthday cake will smoke and erupt lava!
Erupting Volcano Birthday Cake
Bake six, chocolate 8-inch round cakes. Using a juice glass like a cooker-cutter, press out a hole in each of two of the cakes. After leveling your cakes, stack them on a cake board or plate, being sure to place the two on the top that have the juice glass sized holes. As you're stacking the cakes, use chocolate or green icing to fill. Finally, trim the layers so the bottom one is the largest and they gradually get smaller, creating a volcano shape.
Now cover the glass exterior of a juice glass with foil. Place this inside the well at the top of the volcano birthday cake. Then leaving the foil lining inside the volcano, remove the glass. Frost the birthday cake. You may also want to garnish with chocolate cookie chunks to resemble lava rock.
And now for the lava that will erupt from your birthday cake!
In a small mixing bowl, combine one egg white (or liquid, substitute egg white), 1 1/2-tsp sugar and three drops red food coloring. Beat until the egg white mixture is foamy and thick.
Now, just before serving this birthday cake surprise, very carefully, and using a pair of tongs; place a few cubes or chunks of dry ice (check your yellow pages) into the foil lined well. Pour the egg white mixture onto the dry ice in the well.
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