does birthday cake make you blue?

In our family we have a plethora of birthdays in February. I use to be the only one, but when you join a family you can't really go back and change peoples birthdays, right? So now we have six birthdays in two weeks. That translates to cake. Lots and lots of cake. I'm not complaining! Stepdaughter and I have been planning these cakes for months. However this one, and probably the next 50, did not turn out as planned. I had a little surprise up my sleeve and she had a little request.

Stepdaughter loves white cake with white frosting. She loves store bought cakes. I like to cook and I like to experiment so I offered my long-dormant cake making services and promised to make a white cake with white frosting.... with some extra color for fun. I knew I wanted to do something festive. It didn't need to be over the top, but I wanted to play around with fondant which I had never used before. I did a little research and saw a few ideas. None of them worked when I tried them, so here I was with one hour to go and I hadn't decorated the cake yet. Yikes! Enter the circle cutters! I re-rolled out the fondant (yes, fondant with a tad of frosting on it does work well when it's smushed together and rolled out again!) and got out my set of circle cutters and made blue dots. I would have removed the blue sugar sprinkles but that would have made a mess! Then I added these lovely tall candles that I found and voila!, we have a fun cake! She loved it, was very surprised, and thrilled that a homemade cake tastes so good, but it's the frosting that really, uhm, takes the cake!

I used a white cake mix, and used applesauce instead of the oil. It makes for a wonderfully moist cake, plus it takes out a lot of the fat. Works for me, plus I didn't have time on this one to make a from scratch cake that might or might not work this time. As I was mixing the cake she saw the food coloring and said "Can we make the cake blue?" Yes, blue. I said sure and in went the food coloring. The fun part of that was that no one knew but the three of us, so when we cut the cake after dinner our guests were laughing and surprised! It was a lot of fun. And since I knew the external color would be mostly blue and white, it seemed like a fun idea!

My surprise to the birthday girl was the frosting. She asked for just plain white frosting. I don't know what that means, so I made a plain white Cream Cheese White Chocolate Buttercream frosting. It seemed like the best option, and seriously, we could have just eaten the frosting by itself. It was like cheesecake and white chocolate and buttercream. Do I really need to say more? I will have the recipe posted soon. And wait until you see the next cake!

Enjoy!