Birthday Baking: Mom 1/9

Mom loves The Wizard of Oz, so we decided to use a theme from the movie for her birthday cake. We decided on blue birds flying over a rainbow cause "Somewhere over the rainbow, blue birds fly. Birds fly over the rainbow, why then oh why can't I?" (Strangely enough, some people didn't get it.)

The first cake was a disaster. Prime candidate for http://www.cakewrecks.com/ The reason was that we used canned frosting. Crumbs from the cake kept breaking off and getting stuck in the frosting. Twas a mess.

Take 2: Make our own frosting. Ah yes, that's the ticket. Tastier too. We also used a metal sandwich spreader and heated it in hot water to make sure the frosting would slide off. Worked like a charm.

Cue the birds: There's a great website called www.bakerella.com that has great instructions on cake pops. Their recipe makes over 40 cake pops but we only wanted a few birds so we chose their oreo cookie truffle recipe instead thinking we would waste less. The truffles came out alright but we wanted to put them on a stick so that they would "fly." Well, a lot of these baby birds were not ready for it. Only one got off the ground but the effect is worth it.

Lessons learned: Make frosting, don't buy. Truffles are not cake pops. Have Sara do the writing on the cake.