The ADD Kitchen 5: Her Majesty’s Birthday Baking Success!

The Princess strikes a pose on her birthday.

The Princess turned five this past week!

When asked what she wanted for her birthday, she presented me with an oral list that was about twenty minutes long.  I most likely could have walked into any retail store, and as long as I picked out something remotely girly she would love it.

When asked what kind of cake she wanted, she changed her mind every three minutes.  I think that she had selected every kind of cake in the world by the time I finally just picked one and made it.

Thanks to a wonderful link that a great friend shared with me, I decided to make her a butterfly cake.  I felt a little better going in to do this one than I did when I did the Batman cake.  Just in case it was a flop, I had an extra box of cake mix and plenty of powdered sugar to make more frosting!

The link my friend sent me was from the website Parenting.com.  It is amazing.  It gives step by step instructions on how to make the butterfly cake, complete with pictures and even diagrams of the cake.  It should be called “Cake Baking for Dummies”.

I tell ya, this was perfect for me!

This was so helpful, I think I can safely say that there will be no entries sent into Craft Fail this year.  Don’t worry, I’m sure I will screw something else up pretty badly that they’ll get more from me.  The ADD cook still screwed stuff up-when I went to get the ingredients, I misread the list and missed a couple of things.  Luckily, I’m pretty good at improvising.

I also think that I’m starting to learn from my mistakes.  Whhhaaaaat?  Yes-I made the original cake for The Professor in the wrong sized pan.  When I took it out of the oven the middle had sunk.  Then when I tried to take it out of the pan there was a big hole in the bottom.  This time I remembered this and made it in two smaller pans.

It’s strawberry cake, hence the weird looking color.

I had to giggle when I got done cutting it all out, because it really looks like two rabid Pac-Men butt to butt.

Last year I learned my lesson with store bought frosting.  I used a can of the store bought stuff on the Princess Castle Cake, now known as the famous boob cake (it really will be famous, I understand it may be in the Craft Fail book!) I tried homemade frosting on the Batman cake and it worked beautifully.  I’ll never go back.  I did invest in a set of gel food coloring at Target.  Although I’m sure regular food coloring would have worked just fine, the color that it made was gorgeous!  When it was all said and done, both The Princess and I ate entirely too much frosting because it was THAT good.

Official frosting taste tester.

I used the butter frosting recipe from Better Homes and Gardens, except that I substituted shortening for half of the butter in the recipe on the advice of a cake frosting expert (my Mom).

In the end, other than the fact that I should have made more frosting (or eaten less), I think it turned out beautifully!  She was thrilled with her purple butterfly cake.

The Princess on her birthday.  As you can see the cake turned out great!

The birthday itself was pretty quiet.  We went to the park that day and did presents and cake and ice cream that night.  I was a little disappointed in what we ended up getting her-but the girl has a million ponies, Barbies, and stuffed animals.  I didn’t just want to buy more stuff just for the sake of having some birthday gifts.  We would up doing the more practical types of gifts.  She received some great stuff for t-ball this summer, except we’re still looking for pink batting gloves.  She was happy with everything she got, and as you can see below they both really liked the cake!

What’s not to like? Cake= GOOD.