Birthday cakes made easy

I love the fancy birthday cakes. And there are some truly talented and artistic people out there who can make the cutest cakes. But that just isn't a talent of mine. I hate even frosting a cake. Every year, I'd try to make my kids a special birthday cake and just get frustrated with the simplest designs. This year I stumbled across something that changed all of that. Edible icing images.

Rachel with her Dora cake

Owen had requested a John Deere cake for his birthday. I was looking for cake decorations that I could place on top, maybe even cute cupcake decorators, so I searched on ebay for "John Deere cake decorations". Up popped some edible icing images. These are pictures printed on special sheets of thin icing with edible ink. They were really cute and you could personalize them. How fun! But would they be easy to put on? I googled it and found that you just have to frost the cake and use a lot of white frosting (the secret to easily frosting a cake is to use lots of frosting so the cake doesn't peel up and to do it when the kids are in bed or outside). Then you peel the image from the wax paper and gently place it on the cake and lightly press down. The image absorbs into the frosting and becomes the top layer of cake.

Owen's John Deere cake

I was so excited! There were so many pictures to choose from. Rachel wanted Dora and Owen wanted John Deere. No, a drum set. No, John Deere. I waited until he knew for sure what he wanted and then ordered them. I found out they really should be ordered more than 2 weeks ahead of time because that was cutting it close - they actually arrived the morning of the party and I had already purchased some other edible icing images from a local place that I didn't like as well and they weren't personalized so I scraped those off and put the other ones on. Lesson learned- order about a month ahead of time just so you don't have to worry.

Tori's Taylor Swift cake

Tori picked Taylor Swift (kind of strange cutting a cake and hearing - "I want her hair!") and Brendan picked the Detroit Lions. They looked delightful and were fabulously easy and inexpensive. My children thought they were the best cakes ever. And I have to agree. Whoever came up with this idea is a genius.

Brendan's Detroit Lions cake