Layered Alumni Shaped Cake

For my Dad's birthday I made him a University of Washington Cake. And for my brother's birthday a month latter the same cake was requested again. The second time around it turned out even more beautiful than the first time.



Here is how I did it. You can do this with just about any simple shape

FIRST GET YOUR CAKES IN THE OVEN

1. mix your cakes. I made 2 cake mixes, each one baked separately in a 13"x 9" pan.
2. When you fill the cake pans with batter, put some wax paper down on the bottom of the pan to help you get the cake out when it is done and to minimize crumbs when decorating.

MAKE YOUR TEMPLATE WHILE THE CAKE IS COOKING

1. Find the school's logo in google images (one of my favorite places to find simple pictures)
2. Copy and paste it into a word document.
3. Move the margins out on the document to go as wide as the program will allow. (a sheet of paper is about the same size as a large rectangular cake pan.)
4. Enlarge the image to be as big as possible on the page while keeping the proportions the same as the original (Just hold down the shift key while dragging out the corner of the picture.) Don't worry if the image gets blurry, you just need the basic shapes.
5. Cut out the outline of the shape as a block. This is going to be the shape of your cake. (If there are going to be some crevices that could be difficult to decorate, don't cut them out. If you look at my photo, I left a triangle at the bottom and 2 sections at the top that I could have cut out, but left them in for easy decorating and structural support.)

CUT THE CAKES INTO SHAPE

1. Remove the cakes from the oven when they are done cooking and let the cakes rest for about 10 minutes on a cooling rack.
2. Remove cakes from pans and place on cooling racks with the top up.
3. With a long bread knife cut the curved top off of the cakes making a flat surface.
4. Allow cakes to cool completely

MAKE FROSTING WHILE CAKE IS COOLING

1. If getting the right color for your logo is tricky you might not want to color it all at once. It took about one batch of frosting to do my crumb coat and about 1/2 a batch of frosting to do my top coat. So I suggest that you make only 1 batch at a time. that way if you mess up with your crumb coat of frosting you can try again from scratch for your top coat.
2. To make my UW purple I used my Wilton gel tub food coloring. a huge toothpick full of violet, a fair size amount of royal blue on a tooth pick and a small amount of burgundy on a toothpick.
3. For the golden yellow i used mostly yellow with a small amount of brown.

ASSEMBLING THE CAKE AND SHAPING IT

1. Once the cakes are cooled, place one cake in the center of your cake plate (I just covered one of those cookie sheets without sides with foil for my cake plate.)
2. cover the top of the cake with Nutella, Jam, or pudding. Just anything you think is yummy as a filling in cake.
3. Place the other cake, crumb side down, on top of the nutella. Placing the crumb side, or the side I cut the top off of, down always helps to reduce the crumb problem while decorating. I needed a second set of hands to help me for this step. If the cake breaks, don't worry. Just put the pieces where they belong and the filling should help it stay in place.
4. Put the cake in the freezer for about 30 minutes.
5. Take out of freezer and place template on top of cake. Using your bread knife. cut off all the extra cake, not covered by the template.

FROSTING THE CAKE

1. Tear off strips of wax paper and tuck under the edges of the cake on all sides. This will keep your cake plate clean until you are ready to present the cake.
2. Do your crumb coat of frosting, spreading the base color of frosting over the whole cake. cover every single piece of cake with frosting. don't worry if crumbs start to come up.
3. Put cake back in freezer for 20 minutes
4. Apply your top coat of frosting. This is the one you want to have looking very smooth and without crumbs. Don't worry too much about the corners where the sides meet the top and where the sides meet the cake plate because those will be covered with the piping
5. Go back to your template and cut out all of the details that might have been missed the first time.
6. Place the template on the cake and trace with a toothpick the design you want to have on the cake.
7. Prepare a piping bag with a star tip for the edging and a contrasting color of icing inside.
8. Pipe along the top and bottom edges and any other places that you traced on with your toothpick.

some other things I learned from my 2 different attempts with this cake.

• I'd rather make 2 cakes and put a lot of the un-needed cake in the garbage than try to save it and piece the top layer out of leftovers from the bottom. That might work good with a different shape of cake, but when I tried it on this one the top layer just kept drooping over the edges and pulling away from the center.
• Next time I will be more patient when I finally get to piping and have my seashell edging look more uniform.
• Maybe find some sprinkles or something to put in the void spaces on the top of the cake.

Pretend Eye Shadow and Lip Stick Toys

Last minute stocking stuffers from Santa.

This year Santa made a pretend make up set for my oldest because everything Santa found on-line or in stores was real make up and I told Santa I didn't want to deal with the mess of real make-up with a 4 year old. Here's how Santa did it

Pretend Eye shadow

Items needed

• Eye make-up compact
• nail polish (as many colors as sections in the eye shadow compact)
• skewer

Directions

1. Use the skewer or something pointed to empty all the eye Shadow out of the compact.
2. Open the nail polish and pour it into the empty sections in the compact. Use a different color of nail polish for each section.
3. Let it dry in a safe place over night. If there are any bumps on the bottom of the compartments they will show when the polish dries. but I didn't think that was a big deal.

Pretend Lip Stick

Items needed

• A skewer
• A Q-Tip or Toilet Paper
• A stick of lipstick
• A cutting tool for the dowel
• A sanding tool for the dowel (A file, sand paper...)
• Short wooden dowel (a little bit smaller diameter than the stick of lipstick.
• Nail Polish
• Hot glue
• Hot glue gun
• A foam block or something to stick the dowel in to allow it to dry

Directions

1. Empty all the lipstick out of your lipstick tube with the skewer and clean up any remaining lip stick from the walls of the tube with a Q-Tip or tissue paper.
2. Cut your wooden dowel to be approximately the size of your lipstick tube when the lid is on
3. Sand down one of the tips at about a 45 degree angle to make it look like a new stick of lip stick. Soften the edges with the sanding tool
4. Paint the pointed end of the dowel with the nail polish. Allow to dry in the foam block and do a second coat. Allow to dry in the foam block completely. (Photo is of the dowel painted with only 1 coat.)
5. Place in empty lipstick tube and determine how much needs to be cut off the bottom for the lipstick to fit with the lid on. Cut off the extra inches of the dowel.
6. make sure that the lipstick container is turned all the way down to it's lowest position. Put hot glue on the bottom and all around the sides of the base. (Not too much because you don't want it to squeeze out the top.) Quickly put the dowel into the tube and let the glue set with the dowel pointing as straight as possible.
7. Make sure that the lid fits and the lipstick moves up and down freely.
   

I think the great thing about this project is that you probably all ready have most, if not all, of the items in your home or something that can substitute them. So it's sort of a free project.

Barbie clothes

It's been SO long since I've finished a project. I've been doing lots of embroidery since the summer, but after I finished the embroidery I didn't make them into the blankets, so I'll hold off on posting those until they are done and have a home. But here is my most recent finished project.
My Mom gave a barbie for a giving tree gift this year and I helped her to make some barbie clothes to go with it. I would not recommend any of the patterns that I used because I ended up making changes to them, or not liking how they were un-altered.

But since my girls have gotten several barbies as gifts and are getting old enough to put clothes on them, I think I am going to try and make some more clothes for them, If anyone finds some free barbie clothing patterns on line let me know. I've got TONS of scraps of fabric that would be great for barbie clothes.

Here are some of the patterns I found and hope to try soon

Dress tutorials for many movie characters found through all crafts

Belle styled ball gown by Craftiness is not optional on U create

Cap sleeve shirt on craftiness is not optional

Froufy skirt on Craftiness is not optional

Knit top on craftiness is not optional (This one is a lot like the one I tried but it looks like it fits the barbie MUCH better)

Socks in to knit barbie clothes found through all crafts

Evening gown with train on Miss B Couture

PJ's on Miss B Couture

Crochet wedding dress and bridesmaid dress on do fun

Knit valentine dress found through all crafts

Miniature printable patterns like pizza boxes and other accessories for a barbie house.