An Ice Cream Cake Hack

In my last post, I talked about the hobby horses and today I'd like to share with you a little project that had big payoff for me: Claire's birthday cake.  As originally envisioned, Claire's cake was to be homemade by me, presented on a special glass pedestal with strawberry filling and the tastiest cream cheese frosting I know how to make.  But then, we sold our house.

Given that we were to move the day after Claire's birthday, I did something drastic.  I bought a Carvel ice cream cake.

For someone like me, buying a store bought cake for your daughter's first birthday is sacrilege.  (A) It is not homemade, (B) it doesn't go with my colors and (c) it's honestly not that attractive.  So I did what any stressed out, overachieving, avoiding-packing mom would do-- I bought more icing.  Of the Wilton Ready-to-Decorate variety.  In pink and black.

Here's how I did it- using plastic knives and extreme caution, I carefully scraped off all that blue.  It doesn't even taste good, so at least I didn't feel tempted to eat while scraping!  This took a while, so I had to put the cake in the freezer for a bit to keep it from melting, but it was easy enough to do.

Next, I went to town with the icing-- since Carvel seems to have success with their scribbly icing method, I basically did the same.  Only I had to scribble a much larger surface area to hide all that cookie monster blue (hmmm...maybe for next year's birthday?)

And of course I had crafted a few paper decorations, and purchased a FABULOUS chalk board horse from Houndstooth Design on etsy as the piece de resistance.

Sometimes in life, bad things happen to good people.  Like me having to move the day after Claire's birthday (poor me right?)  But then, sometimes those bad things happen for a reason.  And the reason here is clearly so Claire could have an awesome birthday cake.  I love how it came out!  And for so much less effort than homemade.

 

Too bad Claire didn't actually eat any, poor baby was not at all in the mood.  One more reason I'm glad I didn't slave over this one!

How about you- have you tried any successful hacks lately?