60th Birthday Cake

This past weekend was my uncle's 60th birthday and my sister was coming down to my place to drive down together for the party. My sister started decorating cakes with the Wilton cake decorating classes. But she has moved far and beyond the standard techniques that the class teaches and has made some amazingly creative cakes. She and I slaved over this cake and it looked and tasted beautiful. My sister did all the intricate decorating making flowers etc while I mixed the colors and smoothed on the icing. I am not posting the recipe since the cake was made from a packaged mix and the butter-cream frosting is a common recipe made with Crisco. We used a "Funfetti" cake mix and a vanilla buttercream frosting. Read on to see how the the cake was assembled and decorated. This method can be used for making any "age" cake.

For the bottom we used two cake mix packages and then for the numbers we used two small round cakes (made from one package of the cake mix).We then carved out a 6 and a 0 from each of the small round cakes.



Mixing different colors into the icing and decorating was a lot of fun. Smooth on off-white icing on the bottom and then ice on the variously colored flowers and leaves to depict a garden. For smoothing use a steel cake spatula warmed in hot water.



Placed the 60 in the center and then smooth on a contrasting color icing. Border the edged with a pattern to hide unevenness.