Baking...

I heartily believe that icing makes the cake. The cake itself could be dry, flour tasting, pistachio-flavored nastiness (NOT a fan of pistachios...gross!), but with great tasting, smooth, melts in your mouth icing you wouldn't even really notice the cake.

I don't have qualms about pulling out the box of cake mix. I usually add a little more oil than the recipe asks for to make sure the cake is moist, and I ALWAYS add chocolate chips if the cake would be good with them.

The icing in the canisters I take issue with. They aren't bad, but they aren't great either. So I started making my own icing. My favorite to make is cream cheese icing...but that's probably because it's so easy to turn it into caramel cheesecake icing or chocolate cheesecake icing or cinnamon bun icing, etc. AND you can actually make a cake filler first, and then add more powdered sugar to it to ice the cake with, which I did this weekend...

Filling:

1 lb cream cheese
3 sticks softened butter
3 cups powdered sugar
1 tbs lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla

mix (preferably using kitchen aid or the like) cheese and butter until smooth, add 1/2 cup powdered sugar at a time, add lemon juice and vanilla. Mix until smooth. TASTE TEST.

Leftover filling to icing:

Add 1 1/2 to 2 cups powdered sugar, til the consistency is as thick as you want for icing. Taste test before adding more powdered sugar...you don't want it overly sweet.

A girl had her 18th birthday party, hosted by the guy of the house and his friends. He asked me to bake a cake for her. I got Devil's food cake mix, baked the cake in a 9x13, flipped it over, cut the top off (TIP: for rectangular cakes, cut at a diagonal so that you don't break the cake, especially when you get to the end), filled with this heavenly cream cheese filling (TIP: don't fill all the way to the edge, you don't want it to spill over), put the top of the cake back on, added powdered sugar to the leftover filling, and iced the cake with the rest.

It was divine. I saw the girl tonight and told her she needed to come over and have more of her cake...she said she couldn't, but then said "but...icing...mmmmmmm...".

:) Best compliment ever on any of my cooking skeelz. :)

The kids found these cool edible markers, so they decorated the cake with their writing...pretty freaking fantastic, although I think they would've worked much better on a harder icing like fondant...

Also made chocolate covered strawberries. Yum yum!