Let them eat cake!

We threw a surprise birthday party this weekend and I said I would make the cake for it. Feeling particularly inspired by the slight obsession with Madagascar 2 multiple people have here, I decided I would do a fancy cake! Luckily a friend had a book of cake designs for kids parties that I could look through for further inspiration. Originally the cake was going to be a penguin cake, but due to lack of being able to easily find black food coloring and lack of a large enough pan to do it properly I decided to do a lion instead. Much simpler since all I needed were my round cake pans :)

After Alvina convinced me that making the cake part of the cake a red velvet cake might be a slightly bad idea, I managed to find a yellow cake recipe that looked like it would suit for my purposes. It almost did until I only had about half the required amount of sugar, so I used some brown sugar as well and added a bit of extra vanilla (well actually I kinda doubled the amount of vanilla called for).

Yay!!! My 2 layers!!

The next big task was definitely the frosting. It would have been much simpler to buy a couple tubs of frosting and color appropriately, but said tubs run about $4.50 (these are the Betty Crocker ones that are about $1 at home). I'll make my own frosting thank you very much!! So first stop was some yellow frosting to cover the whole thing.

I think this only looks slightly disturbing :P

So frosted up the whole thing and then made up a few different shades of brown by adding cocoa powder to the rest of the yellow (I meant to take a pic here but forgot). Using a piping bag and tips borrowed from the same friend I got the cake book from, I piped on the lions mane.

It's starting to look like a lion!! :)

Next challenge was to decorate his face appropriately. I had picked up some black writing icing (also way overpriced but I didn't want to try to make this) so I used that for the mouth, left over brown frosting for the nose, and marshmallow fluff and chocolate chips for the eyes.

So so so cute!!!!!!!!!

I had a lot of fun and everyone really liked it :) I think I might have to do more decorating of cakes in the future :)