Adventures in Birthday Cake Baking or Making..

For some reason I have decided to try making the kids' birthday cake this year. When I told my mom this, she reminded me of Olivia's first birthday cake that I insisted on making and then me declaring that I would never try that again. Well, just like the pain from child birth, time heals all, and you start getting crazy ideas again. Anyways, I am going with a monkey theme this year and when I was buying the decorations they had a cake pan, and all the reviews said it was so great and it even came with step-by-step instructions! Naturally I thought I can figure out how to do that so I bought it. HAhahah! Below are some pictures of my trail runs so far. There are 4 different kinds of things you can try in the pan. You can use a brownie mix, cake mix, rice crispies, or something called the monkey primate (I haven't figured out if it is suppose to be a big cookie or what).

My First Attempt.

Behold the Monkey Brownie.



 Even with using a ton of non-stick spray and dusting it with flour it still stuck to the pan in places. The brownies themselves didn't taste too bad but there were some weird rubbery spots throughout it. Hmmm...looks like I'm going to need to practice this one again. I couldn't even practice frosting it!

Next Try.

The Crispy Monkey.



 This actually turned out pretty good. Cocoa Crispies on the top, regular crispies on the bottom and frosting for the face, ears, hands, and feet. I used ivory and brown food coloring to make the frosting the right color, but it took forever and I had to use a TON of the brown food coloring. When my mom saw this she said, "Why didn't you just get some chocolate frosting?" Mom's are so smart sometimes. So on my next trip to Target I got vanilla frosting AND chocolate frosting. Along with that I bought two cake mixes, a vanilla and a chocolate, thinking marble cake monkey. Which leads me to my last attempt as of now.

The Marble Cake Monkey

So my detailed instructions say to use a mix for making two cakes. I wanted to try a marble cake. Note: I've never made a marble cake before. First I poured in my chocolate mix, and then thinking to myself I said, "I wonder if I can just pour my vanilla mix right on top and instead of a marble cake it would be like a layered cake. That would be cool!" Well guess what. It doesn't work that way. As I poured in the vanilla mix it was like the chocolate was eating the vanilla alive. After seeing this I then thought, "Well, I will just go with that." The pan was filled to the very top and I had a little bit of extra mix left over so I decided to make a few little heart shaped cupcakes. As I was filling the little heart shaped tins I thought to myself, "I can't fill these completely full or it will spill over as it starts to cook." Then I looked over at my very filled monkey tin. Nievely, I thought, "Surely they would have said something in the directions if I was only suppose to fill it to a certain height. Right?" So I stuck my monkey pan in the oven and under that my pan with my heart shaped cupcakes. Thank you Jesus for the pan under my monkey tin. It didn't catch all the droppings that flowed from my little monkey muffin but it did catch most of it. Therefore, my house only smelled like burnt cake for one day instead what could have been one week.

My Marble Monkey Cake Muffin



This is the cake after I pull it from the oven. It's huge! Luckily I had bought a cake cutter thing that is suppose to help you level your cake. And guess what, after I had chiseled away the burnt pieces that were wrapped around the sides of the pan it worked! And look....


It didn't stick to the pan either!!! I have yet to frost this cake because that night is when I ended up going to the ER for my appendix, but my mother-in-law kindly wrapped it up tight for me and put it in the freezer, so that when I do get back up and running again it will be there ready for me to try to frost it. But look at it! It looks like a monkey! And the top part that I cut off actually tasted really good! So maybe there is hope yet!