My cousin Ruth turned 30 recently, and I was asked to make the cake for her. She's a HUGE boyband fan. Especially One Direction! However, she was very indecisive as to what she wanted for her birthday. Did she want pink and girly? Did she want One Direction? Did she want a cake? Did she want cupcakes? So I got my creative juices going and came up with something that would hopefully be the most perfect cake she'd ever seen (and I think I lived up to it!). Pink, pearl-y, rhinestone-y, One Direction-y and last but not least, silver glittered microphone cupcakes!
I gathered my supplies...Duncan Hines Butter Golden cake mixes (the best cake mix in my opinion!), ice cream cones, bamboo skewers, rhinestones, sparkly scrapbook paper, candy pearls, silver sprinkles....
I started with the cake toppers. I used a variety of sparkly scrapbook papers and cut out the decorations.
A little glue, a whole lot of rhinestones....
And bamboo skewers hot glued to the backs, covered with another piece of scrapbook paper to hide the glue.
I wanted her to be able to keep the toppers, so I took a block of floral foam and wrapped it with pretty wrapping paper, and stuck all the skewers into it (the bunting is hung on braided embroidery floss). This helped us transport the toppers as well.
On to the cake! I made three 8" round cakes and froze them so they were easier to frost. I gave them a really thin crumb coat. I have a few tools, including a Wilton angled spatula, another cake spatula, but in this case, I just used my trusty Cutco spatula spreader.
After letting that set for a while, I added a thick top coat (using the Wilton spatula this time). After this top coat dried, I tried a version of the Viva paper towel trick. The original trick utilizes a Viva paper towel (the only brand that has smooth paper towels with no quilting imprinted on them). You place the paper towel on top of the frosting (once it's set) and smooth out any imperfections with your hand. Well, I hate buying a whole roll of paper towels just for this method, so I decided to try using a piece of printer paper. It worked wonderfully!
Look how smooth the cake turned out!
I used one of the extra skewers to impress diagonal lines on the cake. I then piped a dot of buttercream into the intersections and added sugar pearls. I also added large and small sugar pearls (the large ones have chocolate in them!) around the bottom edge.
Now for the microphone cupcakes! I filled each cone to the inner edge with batter.
Then I iced them, and rolled them in a bowl full of silver sprinkles. So pretty!
I made an insert for my cupcake carrier so the cones wouldn't tip over during transport.
And here is the finished product! So pink! So 1-D! So sparkly! I love it! And she loved it, even more importantly.
you're so creative
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