Her cake:

As usual, the ends are naked in deference to my father. This time, I remembered to use the one pan with a matching plastic cover!

And a "kitchen cake" for myself, to gain more experience with applying edible prints, see if 2/3 of a DH white cake mix would give good volume in a pan roughly 1/2 the area of a 9x13, and (mainly) because I don't eat chocolate:

With this, I learned that I needed to have the edible prints trimmed and chilled while I was frosting the cake, because the BC crusted while I was frosting the chocolate cake and getting the edible prints ready!

Great cake and it looks really yummy.

Congratulations.

http://www.squidoo.com/dragon-birthday-cake

Great job James!  I hope your mom loves it!

Nice job! The chocolate looks yummy! And I especially like how you called your own cake "a kitchen cake"!  That makes it sound so.... required!  I'm going to start calling mine that too!!

Theresa

Well, it's not a kitchen cake in the sense of making up extra servings for a display cake that's either too small or mostly fake, but it is in the sense of being an auxiliary to the main cake.

At any rate, edible prints of roses (from our own garden!) were an improvement over last year's piped outline of a rose, and more practical than finding the time to learn how to pipe roses myself right now (given that I had to pull the cakes together in under three hours, while wrapping her birthday presents and signing her cards, my first day back after a vacation!)

I am definitely not being critical of the words "kitchen cake" so I hope you didn't take it that way!  I enjoyed it from the standpoint of the extra, practice, alternate version, something for me to have myself and possibly not share with others part!

T

I never said you were being critical, and I took no offense; I simply saw a reason to clarify.

AGood!