This cake soars to new levels

So this weekend I had the honor of making two beautiful cakes for some very special people.  Since I want to give each of them their own blog, I will write about one tonight and one tomorrow night.  
The first cake of the weekend was for a little boy named Evan who turns one on Tuesday.  Evan is one of the happiest children that I have ever been around.  He does not fuss and boy is it easy to make him smile.  It is true what they say, smiling is contagious because being around that little man for just ten minutes will absolutely make your day.  So for his birthday, I did an airplane cake.  The cake was surprisingly hard to make and not my favorite cake but it was such a great challenge and I have learned some new dos and don'ts about making odd shaped cakes.  The first lesson that I learned was: be careful of what type of cake you are using when making a decorative cake.  Thus far, my cakes have been mostly of the pound variety which is a more dense cake making it easy to mold and ice.  The cake that I used for this cake was red velvet which, while it tastes good, is a very crumbly cake.  Plus, to make matters worse, the icing that goes with red velvet cake is made with cream cheese.  And here comes the second lesson: be careful which icing you are using when decorating a cake.  Buttercream is the best icing to use if your end goal is to have a pretty cake.  Do not expect to have the most beautiful cake if you are going to use cream cheese icing because it is sticky.  Now that may not be the most descriptive word but I can not really think of a better way to describe it.  Buttercream is light and it spreads smoothly and evenly but cream cheese icing has a mind of its own.  But the biggest lesson of all: Do not do a very difficult cake for your first uniquely shaped cake because you will be heartbroken if it is not perfect.  Try a car or a train first.  There aren't as many curves to work with so your blood pressure will not skyrocket.  An airplane is not for amateurs like myself.  With that being said, Erin, Lane and Evan seemed very happy with their cake and that is really all that matters.  Seeing that little guy smile brought my blood pressure back down and made all the frustrations seem totally worth it. 


So Happy Birthday Evan!!  I can't wait to find out what cake I will be making next year.  I hope that two year olds are into iphones because I've got that one down pat.  :)