My creative skills are limited. I can knit a scarf, I can sew a hem, and I can paint designs on a wall as long as I have a stencil.
I definitely can’t draw or sculpt and that makes cake decorating a challenge. For my younger son’s 5th birthday party I asked him what type of party he wanted. I was trying to avoid last year’s disaster and make a cake and party that he really loved. He was clear that he wanted a Harry Potter party.
Well, a castle cake sounded way too hard even with a cake mold and there was no way I could have decorated a round cake to look like Harry Potter’s face. I went with the easiest thing I could think of and that was a broomstick. At first I thought I would use one of my cake pans and cut the cake in the shape of a triangle. But I didn’t want to contaminate my baking pans (and i doubted my ability to cut a triangle. Sad, I know). I bake everything gluten-free in our house because my husband has Celiac. My kids and all of the guests can have wheat so I went out and bought a triangle cake mold and I planned to use cupcakes as the handle.
I made a double batch of vanilla butter cake that was too big to fit in my mixer. Luckily, I had a Bosch Universal Plus mixer that the company sent me a few months ago to try out. It worked perfectly for the big batch and I didn’t have to use gluten in my everyday mixer.
The cake turned out great after a little critique from the birthday boy. I frosted the triangle cake with Penuche frosting, which turned out a nice golden brown color. I made bristles by painting lines out of yellow frosting. I only applied them to the top and when my son saw it he said, “What is that?” I doctored it a little more, covering the cake with the yellow lines and adding green frosting that appears to hold the bristles together. I placed the chocolate frosted cupcakes in a line and wrote Nimbus 2000. The design was a big hit as was the Penuche frosting on the butter cake.